[Event] A Lyrebird Among the Ashes

You could bury the bodies, mop and sweep the streets, pile up the mail and weapons of the dead that they might be repurposed or reforged, but the smell of blood tended to linger in a city, long after a battle had passed. It hung about the streets in the pall of lingering smoke from the funeral pyres, the ash that clung in small cracks or dusted the thatch. It was visible in the guarded, haunted expressions of the smallfolk, the way in which they lingered in their doorframes, watched anyone who bore steel as though they may be like to bare it in short order. That was the quiet part, the wound that had been stitched closed, held together with the golden wire of the city watch. Sailing into this city, however, she had seen the great swath of inflamed flesh that radiated malignantly out from this attempt to heal it.

They had arrived a few days hence, expecting to find a city with a new-crowned King, or perhaps witness the negotiations that would precede the end of this long war. The last news they’d heard at Sunspear had been that Maegor and Aegon were dead, that Viserys was likely to be crowned, even if he had killed the preferred king. The first indication they’d gotten that this had likely not been the case was the charred ruination that surrounded the city. Fields churned to muddy ruin, forests stripped bare so that they were naught more than hosts of stumps, the remnants of campfires, pavilions and pennants all stamped into the sod. The legacy of a great army, Saersha had the eyes to see it, and Rickard Sharp the experience to explain the meaning of what they saw. A land stripped to its very roots by tens of thousands of fighting men, and some manner of battle between them.

You could tell that, Rickard had observed, from the broken arrow-shafts that littered the ground, and from the size of the husks that the pyres had left. Men only need fires that big when you’re cooking them, their captain had explained to them, a hard look in his blue eyes. This was the mark of war, and it had left a deep cut in this land, the sort that was like to fester.

The first tremblings of a fever did seem to hang about the place as they had disembarked from the Eagle, though mayhaps that had simply been the oppressive heat of the place. She had thought, once she left Dorne, that the climate might have eased a bit, that they would have some respite. But King’s Landing simply had a different kind of heat. It was not the dry, windy warmth of Dorne, the sun shimmering off the sands, the sea air running across the dunes. Here there was a cloying, sweaty, oppressiveness to the summer’s embrace, the humidity filming your skin in sweat. The stench certainly didn’t help. She remembered it from the last time she’d been in the city, though that had been in the cooler days of spring, when the sun’s rays had not been given quite so much opportunity to do their work upon the tanners shops and the cesspits and the teeming drains.

It was not the smell of shit that particularly offended her nostrils, though, as she began to wander through the streets of the city. It was the smell of fear. Three Kings dead within a year, and the only viable replacement for them was an twelve-year-old boy. The foundations of this place seemed a sight less firm than they had been the last time she had visited. That Red Keep which had been a proud proclamation of the might of the Dragonlords now seemed a hollow threat. What was this city, after all, without the Targaryens? With most places in this land, there were centuries of history to fall back upon. Sunspear, Winterfell, Highgarden, even Pyke, they had ruled over their lands since times immemorial, one got the sense that they would stand forever. But this place? This shanty town with its walls of freshly-cut stone, huddled amidst the cut of the Blackwater’s bay? What would it be should the Valyrians fall for good?

You could almost feel the buildings shivering, see a sheen of perspiration on the walls. The trembling of a feverish man, uncertain of what manner of world he was going to wake up in. She was wary of it, the way you’d be wary of a fellow you shared with if he started to cough, but she would not let it dim her spirit. She had come to see this city, and she would sooner see the honest truth of it than some hastily constructed veneer. She would better understand it that way, get a better sense of the songs that were thrumming through its bones. If these were indeed the last days of this city, then she would know it. Know who it was, who it had been, who it may yet be.

They had taken rooms at a reasonably priced tavern, not too far from the harbour. Rickard and his men would share a common room, while she and Callanna had a more private space to themselves. Not that she intended to hide herself away. She was Saersha Harlaw, after all. She had a reputation to keep up.

They wandered the streets as a trio. Callanna dressed modestly, the loose linens that she had purchased in Dorne keeping her cool while not necessarily marking her out as a woman of means, Rickard with his shirt unlaced and one hand ever kept on his longsword, a suspicious glance cast towards every shadow. She donned her painted ochre silks, with the patterns of turquoise and sea-green upon it. Her chestnut hair braided, a harness over her shoulders so as to better bear the two weights upon her back.

One was a bastard sword. The bastard sword, indeed, that King Maegor had gifted her. Gifted, or inflicted. Truth be told she had never quite been able to decide for herself which was the better description. Certainly there was no care in the gesture. He had extracted his blood toll from her, and then he had turned away. She had never seen him again after that. Nor would she ever. The stories went that they had sent his bones back to Dragonstone, which she considered to be a shame. She would have rather liked to go to Oldtown and look upon his head while it rotted on some inglorious little pike.

The other weight was her lute, her soul given shape in the form of lacquered wood and taut strings. It was a pretty thing, its body painted black and then accented with scrolling patternwork in gold and red and green, script whose meaning was known to none, stories that told the tale of story itself. Its strings thrummed just a little as she walked, as the faint whisperings of the sea breeze caught against them.

Whether this fever burns out, or whether it claims the heart of these people, there is a song to be sung here. A triumph or a dirge, victory or tragedy. This city was forged in dragonfire, built up around the first footprints of the Conqueror. It is not the sort of place to die quietly. Wherever her travels took her next, she wanted to see this particular ballad play out.