Not All Men Dance With Dragons

The Boil of Ironman's Bay

War was easy as a soldier.

Get up, move, fight, and sleep. Resign yourself to the fact you will wake up and do it all again tomorrow if you weren't dead already. There was a routine to it. A sense of belonging, when you were merely another faceless vessel in a crowd, made to grasp the handle of a sword.

War was easy.

A rough hand slammed onto Jorran Hallow's shoulder from behind and he fought off the flinch that threatened to make itself known. That sharp bloom of pain came roaring back as he was heaved off of the dirty ground and made to stand.

"On your feet," A gruff voice demanded but they had no patience to wait for him to right himself on his own. Another pair of hands came to his other side and wrenched him along as well, all but dragging him across stone it seemed. He heard others around him working or planning. Jorran didn't know. There was no way he could focus.

They had grabbed him and the group of vassal knights loyal to his father on their fourth night of traveling. There was no way of knowing how much time had passed from then to now. They kept him blinded by a bag over his head for most of it and his mind swirling from fists and boots. Locked in a cell to be starved, beaten, and starved again before he was thrown some bread every now and then. They really knew how to garner the crown's mercy.

His back was raw and scabbed from the lashes he took when he had arrived at, no doubt, the head of operations for this little attempted invasion the Ironborn were trying. Even half delirious, he could taste the hint of salt in the air as he was dragged through the courtyard and up a set of stone stairs.

Seagard. It must have been Seagard because it was the only town along the coast that could harbor enough people for an invasion. That must have been their plan.

All of a sudden, the hands holding him disappeared and Jorran was dropped onto the stone floor. Upstairs, around corners, every up and down way as if they were trying to confuse his already spinning brain. Depriving a man of sleep, food, and blood was certainly a way to loosen his tongue if he is capable of speaking at all.

A boot hit his shoulder and Jorran found himself being edged onto his back on the floor, staring up at a rakish figure in a dark trench coat sneering back down at him as though the country was already won. There was a sword strapped to his hip and thinness to his weasely face. The epitome of an Ironborn pirate looking to make himself a legend.

"You're Hallow, aren't ya?" The pirate questioned.

Jorran simply stared back at the rotten-toothed sailor, sincerely unimpressed.

"Your father is the Master of Laws. He's got the king's ear which means," The Ironborn leaned in and Jorran could smell his stink. Musk and sour ale. "He'll listen to us if we start sending back pieces of his boy."

You got the wrong son for that, the black-haired man wanted to sneer. If it were Stephas slugging through the blood and mud then maybe their father would send out every soldier at their disposal but not for him. Not for the second son.

Silence was apparently the wrong answer as that same boot connected with his jaw, rattling his mind further. "Are you fuckin' hearin' me!?"

It wasn't his ears that weren't working. There was simply nothing he could respond with that would have had him avoid that boot. He spat the metallic taste out onto the dusty floor in a rough cough but even those sounds were interrupted by something else. There were noises beyond the stone walls of whatever castle they had procured that, when Jorran strained to hear them, sounded like a crowd in an uproar.

The Ironborn must have heard it too as he stained his posture and shouted over his shoulder. "What's all that damned racket!?"

His men couldn't answer him but it didn't matter. The sound finally made itself known. Screaming emanated from below through the open windows and he saw that twinge of fear shot through his captors. A smile pulled at Jorran's chapped lips as he bared blood-stained teeth and hissed. "Dracarys."