Steel and Smoke
Second Day of the Eighth Month 293 AC
After some thought on the logistics and the politics of the matter you had decided to keep three of the mirrors in the Deep, one for the Circle of Battle as still by far the largest public arena, one for the keep to send out the messages you aimed to use, and a third for the jousting grounds that was even now being erected just south of town. The remainder you spread out among the cities you rule and at the camps of the Legion, startling a few officials when you delivered them in person. The words 'royal courier' are not usually taken quite so literally.
As for the very last of the mirrors, that you delivered to Braavos, making arrangements to use a lesser-known plaza for setting up the mirror, to give the Sealord at least some threadbare semblance of deniability before the masks fall along with the conquest of Pentos.
***
Third Day of the Eighth Month 293 AC
The forge-fire flares and the screams of fiends were borne upon the wind, filled with hate and rage but with fear also at all they had lost, from the power you had taken from them and bound in smoking metal, half by careful ritual, half by wishcraft, shaped by will alone. The work was tiring not from any physical exertion but from the strain of staying always on edge for an escape or an attack. While the fiends did not have much of a chance of harming you, Irren was another matter entirely. The old mage-smith could die in moments if any of your prisoners had the opportunity to get their claws into him.
In spite of the risk Master Irren only seems to grow more cheerful with every flare of dragonfire, with every dying scream. In truth you suspect he would not even pause to eat if you had not insisted for fear he might collapse from the physical and mental strain of his work.
As you head out into the keep to have dinner yourself with your mother, Dany, and whichever of your friends is free to take the time to join you, Waymar and Tyene catch up to you looking grim and resolute.
Something had gone wrong, but not urgent else Tyene would have used magic to find you...
"...so after I peeled their minds for answers we found precious little to speak of," Tyene explained. "Catspaws and desperate ones at that, the sort of men who barely care if they swing from the gallows so long as there is some silver in it for them. Our best guess is that they were supposed to deliver Andar and then get killed by someone higher up in the conspiracy, but when we tried to set up an ambush in the warehouse they were told to use no one showed."
"We do know one thing for certain, it wasn't maester Helliweg," Waymar continues. "When we went to father with this and explained what happened to Lord Brune too he decided to confront the maester. He was horrified at the thought, practically begging for some way to prove his innocence."
"So I gave him one," Tyene finished gravely. "I looked through his head a lot more closely than I did to those poor fools we caught and he proved himself clean, for which I am very thankful. Getting rid of the body without suspicion would have been... awkward."
Waymar shuffles his feet a bit at the implication that his father would order a man killed without a public judgement, but he does not interrupt. He knows as well as you do that Bronze Yohn would go much further than that to keep his kin safe.
"So it's not the maester. On the one hand it is good to hear that the rot stops somewhere," you muse. "But..."
"We still don't know who wanted to kidnap Andar or for what purpose," Waymar interjects. "He is not worried of course, he spent more time trying to admonish Ysi for having a dagger."
"To which she replied that perhaps he could do with having
more weapons on him in case this happens again," Tyene smiles fondly. "She reminds me of Nym when we were growing up."
"Thankfully she did not take that line of reasoning with
father or I would have gotten an earful," Waymar adds.
"Well of course not. You may have taught her how to stab things, but
I taught her tact," Tyene mock-sniffs.
You only
just refrain from commenting that they sound like they are already wed and only because you are certain Tyene would turn that back on you by talking about how you are with Lya.
"Well if Lord Royce needs any discrete help with his investigation he has only to send a letter," you say instead, resolving to keep your distance unless asked for lest you be seen as overbearing in your as of yet clandestine lordship.
Appraised to the doings at Runestone you return to the forge, wondering if perhaps at the end of the thread you will find yet more fiends to forge into steel or only grasping and foolish men.
How much Valyrian steel do you make, and what sacrifices do you offer?
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OOC: I don't quite like the flow of this chapter, but the information needed to get across, and if I had done it in interludes it would have eaten up a lot more screen time. Hopefully the slice-of-life elements keep the exposition from being grating.