Shera was bored.
Deeply, profoundly, and in a way that had begun to feel personal, bored.
The room they kept her in was not unpleasant. That was almost the worst part of it. Silk drapes hung either side of a window that faced the canal, their pale gold catching the afternoon light and throwing it across a floor tiled in smooth white stone. The bed was proper, with actual stuffing rather than the packed straw she had slept upon her whole life before a vampire prince had turned her into something else entirely. A bronze mirror. A table dressed with food she hadn't touched in three days because the smell of it made something inside her recoil in disgust.
The magister had been in twice to check on her.
Both times he had stood in the doorway wearing the particular expression of a man admiring a thing he had paid significant coin for, his eyes moving across her with the calculating warmth of someone counting the return on an investment.
He had spoken to her in the bastard Valyrian of Lys, which she barely understood. She had said nothing back. He had not seemed troubled by this.
The chain around her ankle was iron.
Heavy and old with a surface roughened by use, bolted at its other end to a ring set deep within the stone floor with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once considered that the thing they were chaining might be stronger than the chain itself.
Shera sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it.
She had been looking at it for three days now.
She wasn't sure why she had waited, truthfully. The first night aboard the ship, she had understood, too many eyes, too small a space, nowhere to go but open water. But here in this room with its silk drapes and its bronze mirror and its untouched food, the only explanation she could give herself was that something about the room had made her slow and strange and almost patient.
She wasn't patient by nature.
Or at least, she hadn't been before. Before was a different Shera entirely. Before was a girl who scrubbed floors and kept her eyes down and did not think too deeply about anything because thinking too deeply had never done a servant any good.
That Shera felt like someone she had heard about secondhand.
She stood from the bed.
Walked the length of her chain.
Looked at the window.
Beyond it sat the balcony, its stone railing catching the last of the evening light, and beyond that, Lys opening itself up to the coming dark, canal after canal of it, white walls going gold and then amber, pleasure houses beginning to light their coloured lanterns one by one like something waking up.
Shera looked down at her ankle.
She reached down and took hold of the chain with both hands.
Snap.
The iron split apart as if it had been made of old wood, both ends falling away from her ankle and hitting the floor with a clatter she didn't bother muffling because by the time anyone came to investigate she intended to be somewhere else entirely.
She stepped over the broken chain and walked to the balcony.
Lys at night was something she hadn't expected.
She had heard of it in the vague and distant way servants heard of places nobody they knew had ever been. A city of pleasure and beauty and old Valyrian blood so diluted it barely counted. The most beautiful people in the world, they said, though who they were she had never been told.
Standing at the railing now with the warm night air moving across her face, she thought she understood it.
The city stretched in every direction from the height of the magister's house, which sat upon a hill with the particular pride of old money. Canals caught the moonlight in broken silver below. White buildings crowded against each other down every slope and terrace, lit from within by candles that turned their windows amber. Somewhere below, music played from one of the pleasure houses, something stringed and low and unhurried. The smell of the city came up with the warm air, flowers, salt, cooking meat and the faint green smell of canal water at night.
Shera put her hands upon the railing.
Looked down.
The drop was not small.
She climbed over the railing, stood on the outer ledge with her heels hanging off the edge and the city a long way below her feet, and stepped off.
The air rushed upward as the buildings rose fast on either side and the canal below grew rapidly and her stomach made a violent objection which she ignored as something else entirely began happening within her body.
It started in the arms the way it always started in the arms.
A deep pulling within the bone itself, not painful exactly, more the feeling of something being reminded of its proper shape, as her sleeves snapped taut against the expansion and then the seams gave with a soft rapid tearing and her arms spread outward, the skin between shoulder and wrist thinning into something stretched and dark and membranous and vast.
Her spine curved hard.
Her fingers lengthened into points.
Her feet split open at the toes into talons, three forward and one back, each curving naturally open in the rushing air as if reaching for something to grip.
Her face stayed hers. It always stayed hers. Everything else became something else and her face stayed exactly as it was, which she had decided was either a mercy or a cruelty depending on her mood.
FWOOM
The wings bit the air.
The drop became a rise as she drove downward with both wings in one massive pull and the canal fell away below her and the rooftops of Lys swept past and then she was above them, banking upward in a long spiral that took her out over the pleasure district and higher still until the whole city sat below her like something drawn on parchment.
She was enormous in this form.
Wrong shaped. All stretched angles and darkness and wingspan wider than a room, her shadow crossing three rooftops at once when she passed low enough. Like something from the old stories, half woman and half nightmare, a gargoyle from the sides of old buildings given breath and a particular grievance about being sold to magisters.
She had been flying every night for a week.
She told herself it was reconisance. That she was building a picture of the city for when Prince Arrax came to find her, which she believed he would. That she was mapping exits and patrol patterns and the movements of the magister's household.
This was partially true.
The other part was simply that this was the only hour of the full day in which she felt like something other than a thing kept in a room.
She flew east over the canal district and banked south over the harbour where the ships sat dark and quiet against the water, their masts making a bare forest at the edge of the city. Then back north, lower now, dipping between towers and over garden walls and through the warm air rising off lantern lit streets.
She was circling back west over the quieter quarter where the buildings thinned and the streets below were narrower and darker and emptier when she saw them.
Two figures.
One large. One small.
In an alley so narrow the buildings either side nearly touched overhead, leaving only a thin strip of sky above it.
The large one was a man.
Dressed head to toe in black cloth so complete that even his hands were wrapped, not a patch of skin visible anywhere on his body. He moved through the alley with the particular certainty of someone making a journey they had made before, steps unhurried and deliberate, one hand gripping the wrist of the figure he was pulling behind him.
The small one was a boy.
Eight. Perhaps nine. Small and thin and bald in a way that looked natural rather than cut, his pale round face wet and his large eyes wide as he stumbled after the man who had him by the wrist, his feet barely keeping purchase on the uneven stone below.
He was crying already.
Shera banked and dropped lower, keeping her wings shallow, her shadow folding back against the dark above.
The man moved through the alley and ducked beneath a low archway into a space beyond, a courtyard of sorts, enclosed completely on all sides by walls too high and too blank and too indifferent. The kind of space that cities grew around and then forgot. The kind of space that had its own quality of silence, not peaceful silence but the silence of a place the sound of the world didn't quite reach.
In the centre of the courtyard was a table.
Stone. Low. Old enough that the edges of it had rounded with age and weather, its surface stained dark in patterns that had no business being their.
Beside it sat a brazier, already burning, the coals within it glowing with a deep and steady orange that pulsed as if it were breathing.
The boy saw the table.
His crying jumped into something else entirely.
"Please! Please master, please I beg you, please, I havent done anything, please my lord, please I'll do anything, anything you want, please!"
The man said nothing.
He dragged the boy toward the table as the boy pulled with everything he had in the opposite direction, his feet scrabbling against the stone courtyard floor, his free hand grasping at the man's wrapped arm with the desperate grip of someone who has run out of every other option.
It didn't matter.
The man was too strong and too practiced and too utterly unmoved as he hauled the boy to the table and with a single motion forced him down upon it, pushing the boy's back flat against the stone.
"No! Please no!"
From within his wrappings the man produced rope, thin and dark, moving with the efficiency of someone who had tied a person down before as he bound the boy's wrists to the iron rings set into the sides of the table, pulling each knot tight enough to make the boy gasp as the rope bit into the skin.
Then the ankles.
The boy fought it. Twisted and kicked and screamed and begged as the man worked, but the man was methodical and the boy was eight years old and it was over quickly.
The boy lay bound and flat against the stone table, chest heaving, face wet, his large pale eyes wide open and staring upward at the slip of dark sky above the courtyard walls.
"Please," he whispered. "Please, master! Please!"
The man turned to the brazier.
He held his wrapped hands over the coals for a moment as if in some form of prayer, speaking words beneath his cloth wrappings too low to carry, before turning back and reaching within his robes to produce the knife.
It was long. Thin. Its blade catching the orange light of the brazier in a way that shouldn't have been possible given how little light their was.
The boy saw it.
"NO!"
The man pressed one wrapped hand flat against the boy's stomach, holding him down against the stone, and began his work.
The boy's screaming filled the enclosed courtyard and went nowhere.
The knife moved slowly. Deliberately. With the care of someone performing a ritual rather than committing a cruelty, which Shera, watching from above, understood on some deep and instinctive level was worse. The boy's blood came immediately, welling dark and vivid across the stone surface of the table, running in thin rivulets along the grooves and channels worn into the table's surface by years of the same dark use, pooling in the low centre of it and dripping steadily from the edge onto the courtyard floor below.
The boys screams turned wet.
The man held whatever he had taken above the brazier.
The flames changed colour.
A deep and sickly blue flickered through the orange for a moment as smoke rose in a thin column and the man spoke his low words again, and the night around the courtyard seemed to lean inward as if listening.
Shera had seen enough.
She folded her wings and dropped.
CRACK
Her talons found the man's shoulders as she drove downward with the full force of the fall behind her and the man's shriek split the courtyard air in two and then,
Silence.
She stood in the courtyard with nothing in her grip.
No man. No body. No blood.
Where he had been was a pile of black cloth, deflated and flat upon the stone, and within it at the edges and collar and wrists, were bones.
Just bones.
Clean. Dry. As if they had been their for years.
Shera stood very still.
She looked at her talons.
Then at the bones.
Then at her talons again.
'File that away for later.'
Her body folded back inward, the wings drawing in and shortening, the talons rounding, the spine straightening, everything pulling itself back into the shape of a girl until Shera stood in the courtyard in her clothes, which had returned to her body with the seamless indifference of magic that had stopped explaining itself.
She turned to the table.
The boy lay there still. Shaking. His wrists and ankles still bound to the iron rings as his chest moved in rapid shallow pulls of breath, his face turned sideways against the stone and his large pale eyes open and fixed upon the space where the man had been.
He was bald. Round faced. Young in years and ancient in expression, those large eyes carrying something behind the shock and the pain and the tears that had no right being in a child this recently broken. Something watchful and precise and quietly filing everything it saw away even now.
Even like this.
Shera moved toward him slowly.
"Hey."
The boy flinched against his bindings.
Shera stopped. Crouched. Brought herself down to his level.
"I'm not going to hurt you."
The boy looked at her.
Then at the pile of cloth and bones behind her.
Then at her again.
His large eyes moved across her face with a steadiness that had no business existing in someone his age, cataloguing, measuring, deciding.
"What are you?"
His voice was thin. Rough from screaming. But level in the way of someone forcing it to be.
Shera looked at him for a moment before reaching forward and beginning to work the knots of the rope loose from his wrists.
"A friend?"
The boy said nothing to tdark-stainedhat. His eyes moved to the brazier, which was still burning, its coals dimming now without anyone tending them, the blue completely gone from the flames as if it had never been their at all.
Something crossed his face when he looked at it. Something that went deeper than fear and would not, Shera suspected, ever fully go away.
She freed his wrists and moved to his ankles, working the knots loose as the boy slowly pushed himself to sitting upon the table, his hands pressing together in his lap, his jaw set.
She didn't look at what had been done to him.
She looked at his face instead.
"What's your name?"
The boy was quiet for long enough that she thought he might not answer.
His large eyes moved across the courtyard, across the bones in the black cloth, across the brazier and the dark stained table and the high walls with their indifferent stone faces. Cataloguing. Filing. The eyes of someone who had already decided that information was the only currency that mattered and was therefore careful about how he spent it.
"Varys," he said.