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Chapter 1: All Legends Begin Somewhere
-{ Ciaphas Cain }-
To be a knight, the singers tell us, there are many requirements.
One must be brave and just. One must defend the young and the innocent, and—most especially—the maidens who, for reasons I have never quite understood in the countless songs and sagas that do not concern dragon-riding princesses, are forever wandering into peril without so much as a dagger at their hip. One must be clean of body and soul, pious before the Seven, courteous in the hall and terrible upon the field. One must speak softly to ladies, sternly to squires, and with ringing conviction when swearing undying loyalty to lord and realm.
It is a fine list.
It is also a thoroughly impractical one.
For in my considered experience—and I have made something of a study of these matters during my years as a squire—the quality that truly makes a knight is not virtue, nor valour, nor even skill at arms.
It is a good story.
Without one, you are merely another sweating fool encased in steel, blinking beneath the sun and praying no one notices that your courage has a most inconvenient habit of evaporating the instant someone begins swinging sharp iron at your head. With one, however—ah, with a suitably dramatic tale attached to your name—even a man of distinctly average ability (or, in my case, one of rather flexible priorities) may find himself proclaimed a paragon of chivalry.
As a young man, I had resigned myself to the conclusion that such a story would never be mine. Not for lack of trying, mind you. I made several earnest attempts to stumble into glory by proximity. I tried to enter lesser tourneys as a squire. I volunteered for patrols that sounded faintly dangerous but not suicidally so when I could just say I had done them and slinked away instead. I positioned myself, whenever possible, adjacent to events that might later be described as "valiant." Yet glory, much like a well-bred maiden, seemed to possess an instinctive aversion to my company.
It was, after all, an age of peace. The Greyjoy Rebellion had long since been crushed in the seasons prior, the Ironborn sent scuttling back to their rocks with their pride bruised and their longships considerably fewer. The realm mended its wounds; lords counted their coin and rebuilt their keeps; and ambitious young knights found precious little opportunity to distinguish themselves in battle. There were no grand campaigns, no rebel hosts to scatter, no dragons to slay—only border disputes, cattle thefts, and the occasional drunken hedge knight who mistook a tavern brawl for a matter of honour.
In such times, the best a hedge knight might hope for was steady service to a comfortably prosperous lord—one not so powerful as to be constantly entangled in intrigue, nor so poor as to forget to pay his men. A decade or two of loyal attendance, a few minor skirmishes with bandits, perhaps the suppression of an unruly peasant or two, and—if the gods were feeling indulgent—a modest grant of land upon which to spend one's declining years tending to a vineyard and recounting increasingly embellished tales of past exploits.
It was not a glorious future.
But it was a survivable one I had set as my ultimate goal in this life. Unfortunately, even that modest ambition was, for a time, beyond my reach.
For I am Ciaphas Cain.
The last surviving scion of a lesser branch of the ill-fated House Reyne. House Reyne. The great fools of song that stood in open defiance of Tywin Lannister and paid for the privilege in blood, stone and salt.
The singers still whisper of the Rains of Castamere in lowered voices, as if uttering the words too loudly might draw a lion's gaze even now. Castamere drowned, its halls flooded, its banners torn down. A proud house reduced to rubble and bone beneath cold water and colder vengeance. It is a most instructive tale, particularly if one has any inclination toward defiance.
My particular branch had been small and inconsequential enough to escape immediate annihilation—an irony not lost upon me. We survived not through strength or cunning, but because no one considered my father Mitchel Cain important enough to trouble killing when he had been absent. A dubious legacy, perhaps, but one I have since come to regard with gratitude. There is a certain safety in being overlooked.
Still, what little land we possessed was razed and left fallow, a scar upon the earth to remind all who passed what becomes of those who cross a lion. No other lord was granted it; no banners were raised there again. It was left empty, a silent warning. Whatever coin our branch had once claimed vanished into those damned sunken halls, swallowed by water and history alike. My kin were dead, and by the time I was old enough to grasp the weight of a name, that name had already become something best spoken softly and with care.
My father—who had inherited neither the blind pride nor the catastrophic judgement of his forebears—did what desperate men have always done.
He bent the knee.
He entered the service of House Redding in the Reach as a man-at-arms, swearing his sword to Lord Lorent Redding—a minor lord of modest means and cautious temperament. It was, in truth, a sensible arrangement. Respectable, if one ignored the quiet humiliation of serving those who, in another age, might have sought our favour.
I believe it was there he met my mother Lyessa Sand. My memories of those early years are blurred at the edges, softened by time and loss. A warm hearth. The scent of feathers and hawks from my mother's cloaks—she had a talent for birds—and the ever-present tang of oil and steel from my father's armour. His laughter, too loud and edged with something brittle, as if he meant to drown out old ghosts with noise. My mother's hands, calloused but gentle, guiding mine around the hilt of a wooden sword she claimed her own family were always skilled in—and later into a falconer's glove far too large for my small fingers.
There were no banners of Cain or Reyne in Lord Redding's hall. No crimson lion upon silver nor silver lion on crimson. Only the sigil of our lord—a golden flagon on burgundy, bordered in gold and white checks, if memory serves—and the constant, unspoken understanding that we lived upon another man's sufferance.
I learned early that a name can be both shield and target.
"Cain? Be mindful it looks like rain this morning," some would murmur, with that faint curl of the lip that suggests they took a certain enjoyment in reminding a boy that his kin had drowned for daring to spite the Lion. Others regarded me with pity, which I soon discovered to be infinitely worse. It was no secret that Lord Lorent Redding kept us close as a token of goodwill—a quiet offering to Lord Tywin Lannister, should the need arise.
I found, as I grew older and more perceptive, that I preferred mockery to sympathy.
Pity breeds expectations. Redemption. Restoration. A reclaiming of lost glory. All very stirring—and almost entirely suicidal.
No, I harboured no illusions of reclaiming Castamere or restoring my house to prominence. I was not so witless as to challenge lions in their own den. My ambitions were considerably more modest.
A good horse. Decent armour. A lord who paid his men on time and did not expect them to perish unnecessarily for the sake of his pride. A comfortable posting in some pleasant corner of the Reach, far from ambitious bannermen and closer still to well-stocked wine cellars.
If that sounds unheroic, I assure you it is merely practical.
Bravery is admirable, yes. It is also remarkably fatal.
And I, for one, had every intention of living long enough to grow old, to collect whatever modest reward fate might deign to toss my way, and perhaps—if fortune truly smiled—to acquire that most essential of knightly qualities.
A story.
Preferably one in which I survived to hear it told and rest of the laurels it bequiffed upon my head.
Though my father could not leave me coin, nor land, nor even the tattered dignity of a title unmocked, he did contrive—by a final act of inconvenient heroism—to spare me the slow, grinding humiliation he had endured beneath Lord Redding's roof.
That, I suppose, is something.
It occurred during what the steward later described—no doubt with a straight face—as "a regrettable disturbance" upon the Redding lands. Bandits, we were told. Displaced men, hungry and desperate, or so the more charitable septon would have it. In practice they were the usual assortment of hard-eyed cutthroats who had discovered that stealing sheep was considerably less hazardous than farming them.
Lord Redding, eager to demonstrate both strength and frugality, dispatched a modest force to restore order. A handful of household knights, a few sworn swords, and—because it is always wise to risk someone else's neck first—a brace of hired hedge knights.
Among them was Ser Felix Jaeger.
I had been his squire since the age of nine, though "squire" is perhaps too grand a word for a boy whose chief duties consisted of polishing mail, currying horses, ensuring he had ink for the countless hours he spent writing and attempting not to be trampled when grown men decided to settle matters with sharpened steel.
My father rode with them as well. I remember the morning clearly: the pale Reach sun rising over damp fields, the smell of boiled leather, the clink of mail. He had ruffled my hair—an indignity I endured with what I believed at the time to be stoic maturity—and told me to mind Ser Felix and keep my head down.
A most excellent piece of advice.
It was in the skirmish that followed—hardly a battle worthy of song, though no less lethal for its modest scale—that my father earned the only legacy he could afford to give me. A bandit, bolder than his station warranted, lunged at Ser Felix from the side. My master, though he had yet to realize that fate awaited him, being at that precise moment occupied with preventing another miscreant from removing his arm, did not see the blow.
My father did.
He stepped in.
The sword meant for Ser Felix found my father instead.
I did not see the moment of impact. I heard it—a wet, dreadful sound that I have never quite managed to forget—and when I turned, he was already falling. He lingered long enough to make himself inconvenient for the man who dealt the blow and cleaved the bandit's head from his shoulders on the decent but in spite of this he hit the ground like a falling tree.
As he lay bleeding into the trampled grass, he summoned Ser Felix and myself close. I was pushed back—quite roughly, if memory serves—in order to make sure I could not see the extent of the damage but I heard enough. My father, who had bent knee and pride alike to survive, who had endured whispers and smirks and the subtle cruelties reserved for fallen houses, did not ask for vengeance. He did not speak of restoring House Reyne. He did not curse the Lannisters, nor Lord Redding, nor even the gods.
He asked only that Ser Felix take me from that place.
"Not here," he had rasped. "The boy… my son… he can't stay, not here. Watch him…ensure he becomes a man…that he…becomes a knight"
Lord Redding, I later realised, would have found some use for me. A hostage to history. A convenient reminder to visiting lords that rebellion ends poorly. Perhaps a marriage pawn, perhaps a minor functionary—anything that kept the ghost of Reyne suitably diminished.
I suspect my father understood that all too well.
My mother had died a season prior, carried off by some creeping illness that no leech nor prayer could turn aside. Of her I had only a necklace of black string with a bit of white ore-like stone and memories already beginning to blur at the edges. From my father, a dyed red silver ring bearing the faintly worn words of our house and a silver lion—a relic of a pride long extinguished but still proof of my namesake.
Between those trinkets and my name, I possessed little enough to recommend me.
Thus did I depart Lord Redding's lands not as heir, nor hostage, nor even as servant—but as the squire of a hedge knight with a conscience inconveniently large and a purse perpetually small.
So began the true shaping of Ciaphas Cain: parentless, penniless, and in the service of a man who, I would come to understand, possessed a talent for misfortune that rivalled my own.
Ser Felix Jaeger was not the sort of knight the singers favour.
He did not glitter. His armour, though well-kept, bore the dents and scratches of frequent use. His cloak was mended more often than replaced and even his looks though surprisingly fair, despite his twitchy and almost perpetually worried expression, with long blonde hair and marred by small scars. He was as likely to be found in a tavern debating points of philosophy with a disgruntled septon as he was tilting in a tourney field.
He drank more than was strictly advisable, though rarely to the point of uselessness. He gambled, but with a mathematician's caution. He swore freely, prayed earnestly, and maintained a stubborn belief that right ought to triumph, even when the world provided daily evidence to the contrary.
A good man.
Which, in my experience, is a dangerous thing to be.
Yet for a boy of nine—bereft of kin and clinging to the remnants of a disgraced name—he was a banner to march behind. He treated me not as a burden thrust upon him by a dying comrade, but as a charge willingly accepted.
He insisted I learn more than the sword.
"Steel dulls," he would say, tapping my temple with a calloused finger. "This must not."
It transpired that before he had ever taken up shield and lance, Ser Felix had trained at the Citadel to be a maester under the instruction of his father. The notion struck me as profoundly improbable. The image of my master in grey robes, chain about his neck, dispensing herbal draughts and sage counsel, was so at odds with the man who had at one time slew two men with a single swing of his greatsword, I long suspected he embellished that particular tale for dramatic effect as he had similarly stated his longtime traveling companion did the same but with six dead.
He swore it was true. According to him, he had been promising in his studies—particularly in history and the higher mysteries—until he abandoned the path to ride the roads, tried to become a poet and eventually set off alongside a one-eyed dwarf. A dwarf not of mere stunted birth but of the true and dying breed of legend that like dragons had almost fallen into myth.
Even now, recounting it, I find the claim difficult to swallow. Yet Ser Felix spoke of the man—Gotrek, he named him—with a seriousness that defied jest. Bound by oath, he said. Sworn to see the dwarf's ultimate goal achieved. What that goal was, he never told me. Whenever I pressed him, he would grow uncharacteristically quiet, staring into the fire as though the flames themselves whispered secrets.
They had parted ways shortly before he took me as squire.
"The boy needs a focussed teacher," Gotrek had supposedly said. "You'd hardly be able to focus on me manling with his scrawny ass trailing us."
At least, that is how Ser Felix relayed it.
Personally, I suspect the dwarf simply tired of dragging a scholar-turned-sellsword across the realm. Not that I understood why they both seemed so committed to each other in the first place. But I kept such observations to myself. It is unwise to mock the formative legends of one's master, especially when said master is responsible for teaching you how not to die.
It was agreed—between them, it seemed—that Ser Felix would see me trained and knighted before returning to his companion's side. His obligation to me, he maintained, did not remove whatever oath bound him to the dwarf. An alarming sentiment.
I had no desire to come between a knight and his mysterious, axe-wielding associate—particularly one missing an eye, which suggested either great resilience or a regrettable fondness for proximity to sharp objects.
And so my youth passed upon the roads.
I learned to fight, of course. Lance and sword, shield and dagger. I learned to ride until my thighs ached and my hands blistered. I learned to read the weather, to judge a man by his boots, to spot an ambush before it closed around us. I also learned that glory is often a matter of timing and interpretation.
On more than one occasion we found ourselves "rescuing damsels," as the songs would have it. In truth, these rescues tended to involve more shouting, less swooning, and an alarming number of irate husbands. Still, we did our share of good. We chased off brigands and beastmen, settled disputes, and once—memorably—prevented a minor war between two landed knights over the ownership of a particularly stubborn cow.
Not all heroics are glamorous.
Ser Felix would speak sometimes of the day he would see me knighted. He insisted I would be better than he—braver, perhaps even nobler. I listened, nodded, and privately resolved to aim instead for survivable.
For if there is one lesson my father's death impressed upon me, it is this: bravery is admirable, yes—but it is also remarkably final. And I had every intention of ensuring that when my own story was told, it would not conclude face-first in the mud of some forgotten field.
In spite of my many reservations regarding fate, fortune, and the general reliability of men who swear oaths with great solemnity and even greater enthusiasm, I must concede this much: Ser Felix Jaeger was a fine teacher.
Not merely in the martial sense—though I shall come to that—but in every other discipline a young man might require if he wished to survive the Seven Kingdoms with both purse and skin largely intact. His abandoned path toward the Citadel had not been entirely squandered upon tavern benches and roadside misadventures. If anything, it lent him an edge uncommon among hedge knights, who are more often adept at draining cups than reciting lineage.
He taught me my letters first, with a patience I did not appreciate at the time. I would rather have been in the yard with blunted steel than hunched over parchment scratching out the same word a dozen times. Yet he insisted.
"A sword may win you coin," he told me once, tapping the page with the end of his quill, "but a pen will keep you from being cheated of it." A lesson I have found repeatedly applicable.
He taught me numbers as well—properly, not merely enough to count my fingers and determine whether I still possessed them after a fray. I learned to tally expenses, to judge the fairness of a purse offered in payment, to read contracts without relying upon a septon or measter's convenient interpretation. It is astonishing how much less frequently one is swindled when one can read the fine print oneself.
From there he broadened my education to history and heraldry. I learned the great houses and their rivalries, the minor houses and their grudges, which sigils to honour and which to avoid mentioning after a lord had taken his third cup of wine. I learned of the Baratheons' thunder, the Martells' patience, the Tyrells' roses and hidden thorns, and—inevitably—the Lannisters' debts.
He did not dwell upon House Reyne or Cain.
For that mercy, I was grateful.
Herbs followed. The properties of willowbark for pain, comfrey for bruises, garlic to stave off certain less savoury ailments one might acquire in ports of questionable reputation. He taught me how to stitch a wound when no maester was at hand, how to bind a broken finger, how to clean a blade properly lest rust claim it before an enemy could. Hedge knights, he reminded me, rarely enjoyed the luxury of a castle infirmary.
"You will bleed," he said, not unkindly. "Best you know how to stop it." Practical advice, and therefore valuable.
Even now, though I would never have admitted it to him in those days for fear of encouraging further lectures, I confess that I took particular pleasure in our lessons in High Valyrian. Ser Felix carried with him a small collection of texts in that tongue, bound carefully and treated with a reverence bordering on devotion. To him they were not merely books; they were companions. Poems of Valyria, fragments of philosophy, treatises half burned and copied by his trembling hands at the Citadel.
At first I approached the language as a chore—an affectation of scholars and dragonlords, hardly relevant to a hedge knight with more immediate concerns. Yet there was music in it. A cadence unlike the Common Tongue. Words that rolled like thunder or whispered like silk, depending upon how they were shaped.
Many of the poems were exquisitely wrought—melancholy and proud in equal measure—and I found, to my mild embarrassment, that I looked forward to reading them. More than once I caught myself lingering over a verse long after Ser Felix had moved on.
Worse still, he composed verses of his own.
He would pace beside the fire, muttering lines beneath his breath, then press parchment and quill into my hands.
"I've had more inspiration," he would say, eyes alight.
And so I became not merely his squire, but his scribe. I transcribed his poems faithfully, occasionally suggesting a word when he faltered—a liberty he tolerated with surprising grace. If there is irony in a disgraced scion of House Cain copying out lofty verse in High Valyrian beneath a roadside oak, I chose not to dwell upon it.
One must cultivate hidden talents. They tend to surprise people later.
That is not to say Ser Felix neglected my martial instruction. Far from it. If his scholarly pursuits shaped my mind, his sword shaped my body.
He was doubly an artist with the blade.
Not in the formal, courtly manner of tourney knights who trained within castle yards under the watchful gaze of masters-at-arms, their techniques honed for display as much as for death. Ser Felix's style had been tempered by the road—by mud, by ambush, by the sort of engagements where honourable challenges were replaced by shouted curses and sudden steel.
He had, as he occasionally reminded me, fought beside Gotrek in more battles than he cared to recount. That companionship had stripped away any lingering pretence of elegance. His movements were economical, direct, devastating.
His chosen weapon was the greatsword. Not the most fashionable of blades, to be sure. It lacked the nimble grace of a longsword and the ostentatious flourish of a spear. It was heavy. It was long. It demanded strength and endurance in equal measure.
Naturally, he placed one in my hands well before I was strong enough to hold it upright.
"You'll have the height for it," he observed, studying me as I struggled to keep the point from sagging toward the dirt. "And the reach. Best we make use of both."
In spite of its weight, he trained me to be swift. Footwork first. Always footwork. He would circle me like a hawk, correcting my stance with the flat of his dulled training blade, forcing me to pivot, to step, to lunge and recover.
"The sword is an extension of you," he would say. "If your feet are wrong, the rest will follow."
Over the years my height became more pronounced. I grew past him—an achievement I greeted with private satisfaction and he with open amusement. My reach lengthened, my shoulders broadened, and what had once been an unwieldy length of steel began to feel… natural.
There is a particular pleasure in discovering that something which once humbled you now obeys your will.
I bested him a few times in those later years. Rarely, and never easily. The first occasion left me stunned, the second suspicious, the third cautiously proud. Yet even as my confidence grew, so too did my awareness of chance. A slip in the mud, a misjudged breath, a flicker of distraction—victory and defeat often hinged upon trifles.
I did not delude myself into believing I was the finest duellist in the Seven Kingdoms. Competent, certainly. Formidable, perhaps. Invincible? Hardly. Time, I suspected, would render its verdict soon enough.
The years were, on the whole, kind to me. My body hardened under training. My mind sharpened under instruction. I learned when to stand firm and when to step aside—an art far subtler than most knights care to admit.
And then, as inevitably as winter follows a long summer—quietly at first, and then all at once—my nameday of nine-and-ten arrived.
It was not marked by trumpet nor by feast. There were no septons in gilded vestments, no banners straining against the wind, no highborn maidens casting appraising glances at the newest knight in their midst. We had camped beneath a stand of ash trees a mile or so from a modest holdfast whose lord had paid us to see his caravan safely through a stretch of road infested with men who preferred theft to tilling. Payment rendered, duty discharged, and no one of consequence left alive to contest the tale—by all accounts a success.
Dawn came pale and cool. Mist clung low across the grass, drifting in thin veils between the trunks. The world felt hushed, as though it too were uncertain whether this moment deserved ceremony or merely acknowledgement.
Ser Felix had risen before me. When I emerged from my blanket, rubbing sleep from my eyes and wondering whether knighthood might reasonably be postponed until after breakfast, I found him already armoured—not for battle, but for dignity. His mail was polished. His greatsword rested point-down in the earth before him. There was a stillness about him I had rarely seen, as though the scholar within had briefly wrested command from the sellsword.
"On your knees, Ciaphas," he said.
I obeyed.
It struck me then—kneeling in damp grass, boots soaking through, mist curling at my shoulders—that this was the culmination of ten years. Ten years of bruises and blisters, of ink-stained fingers and aching limbs, of lessons half-understood and battles narrowly survived. Ten years since my father had bled out upon a field not unlike this one.
Ser Felix raised his blade.
The steel was familiar to me, every notch and mark etched into memory. It had corrected my stance, bruised my ribs, saved my life more than once. Now it hovered above me, the dragons on the hilt staring down at me.
"In the name of the Father," he said, resting the flat of the blade upon my right shoulder, "be just."
The metal was cool even through the leather.
"In the name of the Warrior, be brave."
The blade shifted to my left shoulder.
I resisted the urge to point out that bravery, in my experience, was often indistinguishable from recklessness and considerably more lethal.
"In the name of the Mother, defend the innocent."
There was a pause then. The ash leaves whispered overhead. Somewhere behind us a horse stamped, unimpressed by sacred rites. I found myself acutely aware that this was the moment at which my life would become far more complicated. A squire may make mistakes and be forgiven. A knight makes mistakes and buries friends.
Ser Felix withdrew the blade and placed its tip back into the earth.
"Rise, Ser Ciaphas Cain."
I rose.
No thunder rolled. No ray of golden light pierced the mist. The Seven did not send a sign of approval—though, given my mixed record of piety, I could hardly blame them for withholding endorsement. The world remained precisely as it had been.
And yet it was not.
The title settled upon me with a weight heavier than mail. I was no longer merely the disgraced son of a drowned house, nor the orphaned squire clinging to a hedge knight's shadow. I was a knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
Which, I reflected, meant I had just been granted official sanction to be stabbed in defence of ideals I only partially subscribed to.
Ser Felix regarded me for a long moment. Pride flickered across his features, though he masked it quickly and passed me a prewritten piece of parchment bound to a leather scroll case.
"You have your own road now, this is written confirmation of my knighting to you" he said.
There it was. The unspoken truth that had hovered over us these past months like a circling hawk. My training was complete. His oath—to my father, to me—fulfilled.
"And yours?" I asked, though I suspected the answer.
He glanced eastward, toward lands neither of us had seen in years. "North, first," he said. "There are rumours. A one-eyed dwarf leaving a trail of broken men and beasts. Hard to mistake."
I snorted despite myself. "You are certain it is him? There may be more than one belligerent, half-blind dwarf in the realm."
"Not like him. There are so few left after all."
He did not smile as he said it.
For years I had heard fragments of the tale—of Gotrek, the dwarf with an axe and a destiny. Of battles fought in foreign lands, of oaths sworn in blood and fire. Ser Felix had never spoken plainly of the dwarf's ultimate purpose, only that it was unfinished.
"And you mean to rejoin him," I said.
"I gave my word."
Oaths, I have observed, are the most dangerous currency in Westeros. Coin can be stolen. Land can be seized. A man's word, once given, binds him in ways far more inconvenient.
"You need not go at once," I offered, more out of habit than genuine expectation. "I could ride with you a while longer." The suggestion hung between us.
He shook his head. "No. You would be my squire still, if you did. And you are not that any longer." There was no reproach in it, only certainty.
I felt, quite suddenly, younger than my years. For all my height, for all the scars earned and lessons learned, the world beyond Ser Felix's guidance seemed… broad.
Dangerously broad.
"What if I make a fool of myself?" I asked lightly.
"You will," he replied without hesitation. "That is how men learn."
"Comforting." He stepped forward then and clasped my forearm. His grip was firm, familiar.
"You have skill," he said. "You have sense, when you choose to use it. And you have survived every trial the road has set before you. That counts for more than you think."
Survival. At least on that point we were in complete agreement.
He released me and turned to his horse. The animal tossed its head as he mounted, impatient to be gone. He adjusted the strap of his greatsword across his back, settling into the saddle with the ease of long habit.
"Do not squander it, Ciaphas," he said.
"Squander what?"
"Your life."
I inclined my head solemnly, as though I had ever entertained any other intention.
"I shall endeavour to keep it," I replied. "It has grown on me."
A flicker of amusement touched his expression, and then he turned his horse and rode slightly ahead of me, the ash trees parting to swallow him. The steady rhythm of hooves faded by degrees, first muffled by the damp earth and then swallowed entirely by distance that was larger in my mind than reality, until nothing remained but the quiet murmur of morning. Birds stirred among the branches overhead, their calls bright and indifferent, and somewhere beyond the trees a stableboy shouted at a reluctant mule as the holdfast began its daily business.
I stood alone in my own thoughts.
Ser Ciaphas Cain.
The title still felt faintly unreal, like a borrowed cloak that might at any moment be reclaimed by its rightful owner. Knight of no fixed allegiance. Scion of a house better remembered as a cautionary tale than a lineage. Possessor of a fine sword, a respectable education, and—most importantly—a healthy appreciation for the value of not dying unnecessarily.
The road lay open before me.
It stretched pale and uncertain through the thinning mist, curving south toward the wider lands of the Reach. There is a peculiar sensation that accompanies such moments: the sudden awareness that every direction is equally possible, and equally dangerous. For ten years my path had been set beside Ser Felix's. Where he rode, I followed. When he stopped, I stopped. The certainty of that arrangement had been as steady as the turning of the seasons.
Now the world was… alarmingly large.
A story, perhaps, beginning to take shape.
I adjusted my swordbelt and drew a slow breath, tasting damp earth and the faint sweetness of distant fields. Then I set off along the road in the opposite direction of my former master—toward opportunity, danger, and, if the Seven were feeling particularly ironic, glory.
For I had no intention of being a footnote in another man's tale.
I would have my own.
Preferably one that did not end in a ditch.
I had gone perhaps twenty paces when the sound of Ser Felix hit me. It came first as a distant echo behind me, then more distinctly as the steady, deliberate tread of a horse ridden by a man who knew precisely how much attention he wished to attract—which is to say, none at all.
I turned, suppressing the entirely undignified hope that had leapt into my chest.
Ser Felix remained stationary watching me, reins held loose in one gauntleted hand. His horse snorted softly as he drew near, its breath fogging in the cool air. He regarded me in silence for a moment.
"You did not say where you were going," he said at last.
I considered that.
"In fairness," I replied, "I had assumed the world would present something suitably dramatic once I had walked far enough."
He gave me the sort of look a maester might reserve for a particularly stubborn student. "The world rarely arranges itself for our convenience."
"How disappointing." He shifted slightly in the saddle, glancing down the road I had begun to follow.
"There is a tourney coming," he said.
That word, I will admit, caught my attention.
"Tourney?"
"At Highgarden. I heard as much from a banner man in the tavern a moon back"
Now that, I confess, had a certain allure.
Highgarden was not merely a castle. It was the beating heart of the Reach—seat of House Tyrell, whose gardens were said to rival the beauty of the Summer Isles and whose halls overflowed with music, wine, and knights eager to prove themselves before the gaze of half the realm.
A place of banners and bright armour.
And, more importantly, a place where successful knights were occasionally rewarded with purses of gold.
"I have heard rumours," Ser Felix continued. "Lord Tyrell intends it as a grand affair. Knights from across the Reach, perhaps beyond. There will be jousting, melee, displays of arms."
"And crowds," I said thoughtfully.
"And lords."
"And prizes."
He nodded once with a smile.
I folded my arms, pretending to consider the matter with scholarly detachment. In truth my mind had already begun calculating the possibilities. Tourneys were dangerous, certainly—any gathering of armed men intent on demonstrating their prowess inevitably resulted in a respectable number of broken bones—but they were also one of the few venues where a knight of obscure origin might rise above obscurity.
If one survived the experience.
"You believe I should present myself there?" I asked.
"You have the height for the lists," he said. "And the look of a knight the Reach would approve of. Tall, broad-shouldered, a sword longer than most men care to swing."
I raised an eyebrow at the joke.
"Flattery will not improve my odds."
"It may improve your confidence. Seven knows you'll need it"
A fair point.
"And my name?" I asked lightly. "Shall I declare it proudly before the heralds? Ser Ciaphas Cain of the Drowned Lions?"
The corner of his mouth twitched. "You need not proclaim it loudly," he said. "But neither should you hide it. The Tyrells are not the Lannisters and as a new knight you can hardly use my own sigil."
That was true enough.
The Reach remembered old houses with a certain fondness. A fallen lineage could be tragedy rather than treason in their songs. Still, I had no intention of drawing unnecessary attention to the subject and a lion never did ring true to me.
Discretion, after all, is merely another form of survival.
"A tourney at Highgarden," I murmured.
I could picture it already: the long green fields beyond the castle walls, the stands filled with noble ladies in bright silks, the thunder of hooves and the clash of steel. Knights testing themselves before the eyes of the realm. Ambition dressed in polished armour.
And somewhere among them—if fortune allowed—Ser Ciaphas Cain. It was, admittedly, a far better opening chapter than wandering aimlessly until some hedge dispute resulted in my untimely demise.
"I suppose," I said at last, "that if I am to acquire some renown and try my hand at gaining service under a lord, I must begin somewhere."
"Highgarden is as good a place as any." There was a pause then, one that carried the quiet weight of finality.
"You will find him," I said. Ser Felix's gaze drifted northward, beyond the low hills where the mist still clung.
"I will. I hope we'll see each other again."
He nodded once. Then he extended his arm. I clasped it firmly. It was not the grip of knight and squire now, but of two men whose paths had diverged.
"You will do well," he said.
"I intend to," I replied. "Preferably without dying in the attempt."
He laughed softly at that, the sound sharp in the cool morning air.
"Try not to make too much a fool of yourself at Highgarden."
"I shall endeavour to fail with dignity." With that he turned his horse again. This time there was no hesitation in the motion. He rode north, the mist parting around him until the trees swallowed him entirely.
He did not return for the minutes I spent waiting.
For a long moment I stood there, listening to the fading rhythm of his horse.
Then I turned south. Highgarden awaited. A tourney. A gathering of knights eager to carve their names into the memory of the realm.
And somewhere among them, perhaps, the beginning of the tale that would one day be told of Ser Ciaphas Cain. Provided, of course, that I managed the one task that had thus far served me better than any blade.
Surviving long enough to hear it.