Tyland Lannister, blind and crippled, had always treated the king with deference, speaking to him gently, seeking to guide rather than command. Unwin Peake made a sterner Hand; brusque and hard, he showed little patience with the young monarch, treating him “more like a sulky boy than like a king” in Mushroom’s words, and making no effort to involve His Grace in the day-to-day rule of his kingdom. When Aegon III retreated back into silence, solitude, and a brooding passivity, his Hand was pleased to ignore him, save on certain formal occasions when his presence was required.

  Rightly or wrongly, Ser Tyland Lannister was perceived as having been a weak and ineffectual Hand, yet somehow also sinister, scheming, even monstrous. Lord Unwin Peake came to the Handship determined to demonstrate his strength and rectitude. “This Hand is not blind, nor veiled, nor crippled,” he announced before king and court. “This Hand can still wield a sword.” And so saying, he drew his longsword from its scabbard and raised it high so all might see it. Whispers flew about the hall. It was no common blade that his lordship held, but one forged of Valyrian steel: Orphan-Maker, last seen in the hands of Bold Jon Roxton as he laid about at Hard Hugh Hammer’s men in a yard at Tumbleton.

  The Feast Day of Our Father Above is a most propitious day for making judgments, the septons teach us. In 133 AC, the new Hand decreed that it should be a day when those who had previously been judged would at last be punished for their crimes. The city gaols were crowded to bursting, and even the deep dungeons below the Red Keep were near full. Lord Unwin emptied them. The prisoners were marched or dragged out to the square before the Red Keep’s gates, where thousands of Kingslanders gathered to see them receive their due. With the somber young king and his stern Hand looking down from the battlements, the King’s Justice set to work. As there was too much work for one sword alone, Tessario the Thumb and his Fingers were tasked with aiding him.

  “It would have gone more quickly if the Hand had sent to the Street of Flies for butchers,” Mushroom observes, “for it was butcher’s work they were about, hacking and cleaving.” Forty thieves had their hands removed. Eight rapers were gelded, then marched naked to the riverside with their genitals hung about their necks, to be put aboard ships for the Wall. A suspected Poor Fellow who preached that the Seven sent the Winter Fever to punish House Targaryen for incest had his tongue removed. Two pox-riddled whores were mutilated in unspeakable ways for passing the pox to dozens of men. Six servants found guilty of stealing from their masters had their noses slit; a seventh, who cut a hole in a wall to peek upon his master’s daughters in their nakedness, had the offending eye plucked out as well.

  Next came the murderers. Seven were brought forth, one an innkeep who had been killing certain of his guests (those he judged would not be missed) and stealing their valuables since the Old King’s time. Where the other murderers were hanged straightaway, he had his hands hacked off and burned before his eyes, then he was hung by a noose and disemboweled as he strangled.

  Last came the three most prominent prisoners, the ones that the mob had been waiting for: yet another “Shepherd Reborn,” the captain of a Pentoshi merchantman who had been accused and found guilty of bringing the Winter Fever from Sisterton to King’s Landing, and the former Grand Maester Orwyle, a convicted traitor and a deserter from the Night’s Watch. The King’s Justice, Ser Victor Risley, attended to each of them himself. He removed the heads of the Pentoshi and the false Shepherd with his headsman’s axe, but Grand Maester Orwyle was granted the honor of dying by the sword, in view of his age, high birth, and long service.

  “When Our Father’s Feast was done and the mob before the gates dispersed, the King’s Hand was well satisfied,” wrote Septon Eustace, who would depart for Stoney Sept the next day. “Would that I could write that the smallfolk returned to their homes and hovels to fast and pray and beg forgiveness for their own sins, but that would be far from the truth. Flush with blood, they sought out dens of sin instead, and the city’s alehouses, wine sinks, and brothels were crowded unto bursting, for such is the wickedness of men.” Mushroom says the same, though in his own way. “Whenever I see a man put to death, I like to have a flagon and a woman afterward, to remind myself that I am still alive.”

  King Aegon III stood atop the gatehouse battlements throughout the Feast of Our Father Above, and never spoke nor looked away from the bloodletting below. “The king had as well been made of wax,” observed Septon Eustace. Grand Maester Munkun echoes him. “His Grace was present, as was his duty, yet somehow he seemed far away as well. Some of the condemned turned to the battlements to shout out cries for mercy, but the king never seemed to see them, nor hear their desperate words. Make no mistake. This feast was served to us by the Hand, and ’twas he who gorged upon it.”

  By midyear the castle, city, and king were all firmly in the grasp of the new Hand. The smallfolk were quiet, the Winter Fever had receded, Queen Jaehaera hid in seclusion in her chambers, King Aegon trained in the yard by morning and stared at the stars by night. Beyond the walls of King’s Landing, however, the woes that had afflicted the realm these past two years had only worsened. Trade had withered away to nothing, war continued in the west, famine and fever ruled much of the North, and to the south the Dornishmen were growing bolder and more troublesome. It was past time the Iron Throne showed its power, Lord Peake decided.

  Construction had been completed on eight of the ten great warships commissioned by Ser Tyland, so the Hand resolved to begin by opening the narrow sea to trade once more. To command the royal fleet, he tapped another uncle, Ser Gedmund Peake, a seasoned battler known as Gedmund Great-Axe for his favored weapon. Though justly renowned for his prowess as a warrior, Ser Gedmund had little knowledge or experience of ships, however, so his lordship also summoned the notorious sellsail Ned Bean (called Blackbean, for his thick black beard) to serve as the Great-Axe’s second-in-command and advise him on all matters nautical.

  The situation in the Stepstones as Ser Gedmund and Blackbean set sail was chaotic, to say the least. Racallio Ryndoon’s ships had been swept from the sea for the most part, but he still ruled Bloodstone, largest of the islands, and a few smaller rocks. The Tyroshi had been on the point of overwhelming him when Lys and Myr had made peace and launched a joint attack on Tyrosh, forcing the Archon to recall his ships and swords. The three-headed alliance of Braavos, Pentos, and Lorath had lost one of its heads with the withdrawal of the Lorathi, but the Pentoshi sellswords now held all the Stepstones not in the hands of Racallio’s men, and the Braavosi warships owned the waters between.

  Westeros could not hope to prevail in a sea war against Braavos, Lord Unwin knew. His purpose, he declared, was to put an end to the rogue Racallio Ryndoon and his piratical kingdom and establish a presence upon Bloodstone, to ensure that never again could the narrow sea be closed. The royal fleet—comprised of the eight new warships and some twenty older cogs and galleys—was nowise large enough to accomplish this, so the Hand wrote to Driftmark, instructing the Lord of the Tides to gather “your lord grandsire’s fleets and put them under the command of our good uncle Gedmund, so that he may open the sea roads once again.”

  This was no more than Alyn Velaryon had long desired, as the Sea Snake had before him, though when he read the message the young lord bristled and declared, “They are my fleets now, and Baela’s monkey is more suited to command them than Nuncle Gedmund.” Even so, he did as he was bid, bringing together sixty war galleys, thirty longships, and more than a hundred cogs and great cogs to meet the royal fleet as it swept out from King’s Landing. As the great war fleet passed through the Gullet, Ser Gedmund sent over Blackbean to Lord Alyn’s flagship, Queen Rhaenys, with a letter authorizing him to take command of the Velaryon squadrons, “so that they may benefit from his many years of experience.” Lord Alyn sent him back. “I would have hanged him,” he wrote to Ser Gedmund, “but I am loath to waste good hempen rope on a bean.”

  In winter, strong north winds oft prevail upon the narrow sea, so the fleet made splendid time on its voyage south. Off Tarth, another dozen longships rowed out to further swell their ranks, commanded by Lord Bryndemere the Evenstar. The tidings that his lordship brought proved less welcome, however. The Sealord of Braavos, the Archon of Tyrosh, and Racallio Ryndoon had made common cause; they would rule the Stepstones jointly, and only such ships as were licensed to trade by Braavos or Tyrosh would be allowed to pass. “What of Pentos?” Lord Alyn wanted to know. “Discarded,” the Evenstar informed him. “A pie split three ways offers larger slices than one cut into quarters.”

  Gedmund Great-Axe (who had been so seasick during the voyage that the sailors had named him Gedmund Green-Sick) decided that the King’s Hand should be informed of this new alignment amongst the warring cities. The Evenstar had already sent a raven to King’s Landing, so Peake decreed that the fleet would remain at Tarth until a reply was received. “That will lose us any hope of taking Racallio by surprise,” argued Alyn Velaryon, but Ser Gedmund proved adamant. The two commanders parted angrily.

  The next day when the sun rose, Blackbean woke Ser Gedmund to inform him that the Lord of the Tides was gone. The entire Velaryon fleet had slipped off during the night. Gedmund Great-Axe snorted. “Run back to Driftmark, I’d venture,” he said. Ned Bean agreed, calling Lord Alyn “a scared boy.”

  They could not have been more wrong. Lord Alyn had taken his ships south, not north. Three days later, whilst Gedmund Great-Axe and his royal fleet still lingered off the coast of Tarth waiting on a raven, battle was joined amongst the rocks, sea stacks, and tangled waterways of the Stepstones. The attack caught the Braavosi unawares, with their grand admiral and twoscore of his captains feasting on Bloodstone with Racallio Ryndoon and the envoys from Tyrosh. Half of the Braavosi ships were taken, burned, or sunk whilst still at anchor or tied to a dock, others as they raised sail and tried to get under way.

  The fight was not entirely bloodless. The Grand Defiance, a towering Braavosi dromond of four hundred oars, fought her way past half a dozen smaller Velaryon warships to gain the open sea, only to find Lord Alyn himself bearing down on her. Too late, the Braavosi tried to turn to face her attacker, but the huge dromond was ponderous in the water and slow to answer, and Queen Rhaenys struck her broadside with every oar churning water.

  The Queen’s prow smashed into the side of the great Braavosi ship “like a great oaken fist,” one observer wrote later, splintering her oars, crashing through her planks and hull, toppling her masts, cutting the massive dromond almost in two. When Lord Alyn shouted to his rowers to back them off, the sea rushed into the gaping wound the Queen had made, and the Grand Defiance went down in mere moments, “and with it, the Sealord’s swollen pride.”

  Alyn Velaryon’s victory was complete. He lost three ships in the Stepstones (one, sadly, was the True Heart, captained by his cousin Daeron, who perished when she sank), whilst sinking more than thirty and capturing six galleys, eleven cogs, eighty-nine hostages, vast amounts of food, drink, arms, and coin, and an elephant meant for the Sealord’s menagerie. All this the Lord of the Tides brought back to Westeros, along with the name that he would carry for the rest of his long life: Oakenfist. When Lord Alyn sailed Queen Rhaenys up the Blackwater Rush and rode in through the River Gate on the back of the Sealord’s elephant, tens of thousands lined the city streets shouting his name and clamoring for a glimpse of their new hero. At the gates of the Red Keep, King Aegon III himself appeared to welcome him.

  Once within the walls, however, it was a different story. By the time Alyn Oakenfist reached the throne room, the young king had somehow vanished. Instead Lord Unwin Peake scowled down at him from atop the Iron Throne, and said, “You fool, you thrice-damned fool. If I dared, I would have your bloody head off.”

  The Hand had good cause to be so wroth. However loudly the mob might cheer for Oakenfist, their bold young hero’s rash attack had left the realm in an untenable position. Lord Velaryon might have captured a score of Braavosi ships and an elephant, but he had not taken Bloodstone, nor any of the other Stepstones; the knights and men-at-arms such a conquest would have required had been aboard the larger ships of the royal fleet that he abandoned off the shores of Tarth. The destruction of Racallio Ryndoon’s pirate kingdom had been Lord Peake’s objective; instead, Racallio appeared to have emerged stronger than ever. The last thing the Hand desired was war with Braavos, richest and most powerful of the Nine Free Cities. “Yet that is what you have given us, my lord,” Peake thundered. “You have given us a war.”

  “And an elephant,” Lord Alyn answered insolently. “Pray, do not forget the elephant, my lord.”

  The remark drew nervous titters even from Lord Peake’s own handpicked men, Mushroom tells us, but the Hand was not amused. “He was not a man who liked to laugh himself,” the dwarf says, “and he liked being laughed at even less.”

  Though other men might fear to provoke Lord Unwin’s enmity, Alyn Oakenfist was secure in his own strength. Though barely a man grown, and bastard born as well, he was wed to the king’s half-sister, had all the power and wealth of House Velaryon at his command, and had just become the darling of the smallfolk. Lord Regent or no, Unwin Peake was not so mad as to imagine he could safely harm the hero of the Stepstones.

  “All young men suspect they are immortal,” Grand Maester Munkun writes in the True Telling, “and whenever a young warrior tastes the heady wine of victory, suspicion becomes certainty. Yet the confidence of youth counts for little against the cunning of age. Lord Alyn might smile at the Hand’s rebukes, but he would soon be given good reason to dread the Hand’s rewards.”

  Munkun knew whereof he wrote. Seven days after the triumphant return of Lord Alyn to King’s Landing, he was honored in a lavish ceremony in the Red Keep, with King Aegon III seated on the Iron Throne and the court and half the city looking on. Ser Marston Waters, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, dubbed him a knight. Unwin Peake, Lord Regent and Hand of the King, draped an admiral’s golden chain about his neck and presented him with a silver replica of the Queen Rhaenys as a token of his victory. The king himself inquired if his lordship would consent to serve upon his small council, as master of ships. Lord Alyn humbly agreed.

  “Then the Hand’s fingers closed about his throat,” says Mushroom. “The voice was Aegon’s, the words Unwin’s.” His leal subjects in the west had long been troubled by reavers from the Iron Islands, the young king declared, and who better to bring peace to the Sunset Sea than his new admiral? And Alyn Oakenfist, that proud and headstrong youth, found he had no choice but to agree to sail his fleets around the southern end of Westeros to win back Fair Isle and end the menace of Lord Dalton Greyjoy and his ironmen.

  The trap was neatly set. The voyage was perilous, and like to take a heavy toll of the Velaryon fleets. The Stepstones teemed with enemies, who would not be taken unawares a second time. Past them lay the barren coasts of Dorne, where Lord Alyn was not like to find safe harbor. And should he gain the Sunset Sea, he would find the Red Kraken waiting with his longships. If the ironmen prevailed, the power of House Velaryon would be broken for good and all, and Lord Peake need never again suffer the insolence of the boy called Oakenfist. If Lord Alyn triumphed, Fair Isle would be restored to its true lords, the westerlands would be freed from further outrage, and the lords of the Seven Kingdoms would learn the price of defying King Aegon III and his new Hand.

  The Lord of the Tides made a gift of his elephant to King Aegon III as he took his leave of King’s Landing. Returning to Hull to gather his fleet and take on provisions for the long journey, he said his farewells to his wife, the Lady Baela, who sent him on his way with a kiss, and the news that she was with child. “Name him Corlys, after my grandsire,” Lord Alyn told her. “One day he may sit the Iron Throne.” Baela laughed at that. “I will name her Laena, after my mother. One day she may ride a dragon.”

  Lord Corlys Velaryon had made nine famous voyages on his Sea Snake, it will be recalled. Lord Alyn Oakenfist would make six, upon six different ships. “My ladies,” he would call them. On his voyage round Dorne to Lannisport, he sailed a Braavosi war galley of two hundred oars, captured in the Stepstones and renamed the Lady Baela after his young wife.

  Some might think it queer for Lord Peake to send off the largest fleet in the Seven Kingdoms whilst war with Braavos threatened. Ser Gedmund Peake and the royal fleet had been recalled from Tarth to the Gullet, to guard the entrance to Blackwater Bay should the Braavosi seek to retaliate against King’s Landing, but other ports and cities all up and down the narrow sea remained vulnerable, so the King’s Hand dispatched fellow regent Lord Manfryd Mooton to Braavos to treat with the Sealord and return his elephant. Six other noble lords accompanied him, along with threescore knights, guardsmen, servants, scribes, and septons, six singers…and Mushroom, who supposedly hid in a wine cask to escape the gloom of the Red Keep and “find a place where men remembered how to laugh.”

  Then as now, the Braavosi were a pragmatic people, for theirs is a city of escaped slaves where a thousand false gods are honored, but only gold is truly worshipped. Profit means more than pride amongst the hundred isles. Upon arrival, Lord Mooton and his companions marveled at the Titan, and were taken to the fabled Arsenal to witness the building of a warship, completed in a single day. “We have already replaced every ship that your boy admiral stole or sank,” the Sealord boasted to Lord Mooton.