Game of Thrones: I Created the Magic Web

Sorry, I thought it was just a common cold, but it's gotten worse these past two days. I can't write much. Please bear with me. I'll try my best to make it up before the end of the month. Thank you.

The drumbeats hammered out the rhythm of battle as the *Iron Victory* surged forward, its prow cleaving the turbulent green water. The smaller ship ahead was turning, its oars churning the sea, the rose banner snapping in the wind: white roses on a red shield, both fore and aft, a golden rose atop the mast, set against a field of grass green. The *Iron Victory* slammed into her side, the force of the impact so great that half the men preparing to board were knocked off their feet. Oars snapped and splintered, a sound like music to the captain's ears.

He was first over the rail, landing on the deck below, his golden cloak swirling behind him. The white roses gave way before Victarion Greyjoy, armored head to heel and helmed in the shape of a sea beast. As always. They gripped longswords, spears, and axes, but nine men in ten wore no armor, and the tenth only boiled leather. They were no ironborn, Victarion thought with contempt; they feared to drown.

"Kill him!" someone shouted. "He's only one man!"

"Come, then!" he roared back. "Come and kill me if you can."

The rose warriors came at him from all sides, cold iron in hand, but their eyes were full of fear, and Victarion tasted it. He lunged left and right, hacking off the arm of one man, cleaving through the shoulder of another. A third buried his axe in Victarion's soft pine shield, and the iron captain slammed the shield back into the fool's face, knocking him sprawling, and then brought his axe down as the man tried to rise. He was struggling to wrench the axe free from the dead man's ribs when a spear pricked him between the shoulder blades, feeling no more than a tap on the back. Victarion spun and hewed at the spearman's head, steel biting through helm, hair, and skull, a shock running up his arm. The man teetered for a moment, then collapsed face down on the deck as the iron captain wrenched his axe free, looking more drunk than dead.

By then his ironmen were leaping down onto the attacked vessel after him. He heard Wulfe One-Ear give a war cry, glimpsed Ragnar Pyke in his rusted mail wading into the fray, saw Nute the Barber hurl his spinning axe into an enemy's chest. Victarion slew two more, and would have taken a third, but Ragnar got there first. "Well done!" Victarion shouted to him.

He turned to find his axe another victim and saw their captain on the far side of the deck. The man's white surcoat was splashed with blood, but Victarion could make out the sigil on his breast: a white rose on a red shield. The same emblem was painted on the man's shield, a red field surrounded by white battlements. "You!" the iron captain bellowed across the carnage. "You wear the rose! Are you Lord of Southshield?"

The man threw back his visor, revealing a beardless face. "I am his heir, Ser Talbert Serry. And you, sea monster?"

"Your death."

Ser Talbert leapt forward to meet him. His longsword was good castle-forged steel, and the young knight wielded it with a flourish. His tenth cut went low, and Victarion turned it aside with his axe, but the twentieth blow crashed against his helm before he could lift his shield. Victarion answered with a sideways chop, and Serry took the blow on his shield, sending splinters flying. There was a sweet sharp crack as the white rose split in two. Then the young knight's sword was hammering at his thigh, ringing against the plate. The boy is quick, the iron captain realized, and he slammed his shield into Serry's face, staggering him back toward the rail. Then he raised his axe high, putting his weight behind the blow, meaning to split the young man in half. Serry twisted away from the stroke at the last instant. The axe bit deep into the rail, sending shards flying, and when he tried to wrench it free, it would not budge. The deck rolled beneath his feet, and he went down on one knee.

Ser Talbert threw his shattered shield aside and slashed down with his longsword. Victarion's shield had twisted around when he fell, so he caught Serry's blade in his gauntleted fist instead. The joints of his iron hand creaked, and a hot pain made him grunt, but Victarion held on. "I am quick as well, boy," he said, and ripped the sword from the knight's hand and flung it into the sea.

Ser Talbert stared at him, wide-eyed. "My sword…"

Victarion seized the young man's throat with his bloody fist. "Go fetch it!" He shoved him hard, over the rail, and into the blood-slick sea.

That gave him time to free his axe. The white roses were falling back before the iron tide, some trying to flee belowdecks, others shouting for quarter. Victarion felt hot blood running down his fingers inside his mail and leather and iron gauntlets, but it was nothing. A knot of foes had gathered around the mast to make a last stand, shoulder to shoulder. At least they were men, and would not yield. Victarion decided to grant some of them the death they seemed to crave. He tapped his axe against his shield and charged.

The Drowned God made Victarion Greyjoy to wear iron, not to argue at kingsmoots, nor to creep and steal through bogs and reedy meres. He was made to hold an axe in a gloved hand, and bring it crashing down upon men in iron. Every stroke was death.

They came at him from front and rear, but their swords could no more harm him than willow branches. Nothing cut through Victarion Greyjoy's plate, and he gave them no joints to find, only mail and leather beneath. It made no matter whether three men attacked him, or four, or five; he slew them one by one, confident that his steel would turn the rest aside. Each time one fell he moved his rage onto the next.

The last one must have been a smith; bull-necked, one shoulder thicker than the other. He wore studded leather and a boiled leather cap. His one good blow had finally shattered Victarion's shield beyond repair, but the iron captain's answering chop had split his head in two. Would that dealing with Euron Crow's Eye were so easy. He wrenched his axe free, and the smith's brains burst from his skull, spattering bone and blood and grey matter everywhere as the corpse came crashing down, leaning against his leg. Too late to yield now, Victarion thought as he shoved the dead man off him.

The deck beneath his feet was slick with blood and strewn with heaps of dead and dying. He threw his shield aside and sucked in a deep breath. "Commander," Nute was beside him, "the day is ours."

The sea was thick with ships, some burning, some sinking, some shattered. Between their hulls the water was a stew of corpses, broken oars, and men clinging to wreckage. In the distance, a dozen longships of the southron sort were fleeing up the Mander at all speed. Let them run, Victarion thought; let them carry the tale. Men who ran were not worth killing.

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