Blood of Dragons

News has come slowly to those travelling west along the gold road, carried by riders and passing merchants, and often little more than a name or an account already told several times before. By Deep Den, the first great castle of the westerlands upon their road, fuller tidings of the disaster off Oldtown have reached them. More of the dead have been named, and stranger tales have followed the first accounts of the sinking.

Among the losses now confirmed is Jonquil Roxton, born of House Mooton, wife to Ser Jon Roxton, the heir to the Ring and commander of the River Gate in King’s Landing. She had sailed with the Hightower wedding train on its return to the Reach. On the seventh day of the fourth moon, three days after the Pride of Oldtown foundered, her body was found washed ashore among those of other victims. In the days that followed the wreck, more and more bodies were found along the shore, and further names were added to the accounts sent to their kin.

Ser Malard Beesbury and his wife Callista, daughter of Lord Lester Cuy, are also numbered among the dead, leaving three young children behind. Ser Lywen Varner, son of the famous Ser Talen, was lost as well, and Alayne Reyne, daughter of Ser Alek Reyne and Ameria Serry. The storm claimed other ships besides the great galley and her escorts, and hundreds of men and women have perished, sailors and passengers whose families have their own losses to mourn.

Yet one man aboard the Pride of Oldtown has lived to tell of it… although he has little enough to tell. Ser Garmund Hightower, brother to the late Lord Lyonel and widower of Lady Rhaena Targaryen, is said to be the sole survivor of the great galley. The knight himself says he recalls the ship beginning to pitch over, and nothing thereafter. That he should have been found alive upon the shore when so many others drowned has been called a miracle, and already there are those who say a dragon plucked him from the sea and bore him to safety.

There is another tale, stranger still, which has followed the ships and merchants out of the Reach. Sailors swear that through the hard rain, when lightning lit the sea, they saw a great kraken, its tentacles wrapping about the Pride of Oldtown and dragging her over. The story has passed from sailors to merchants, with news shared among relations in the Shield Islands and carried onward to Lannisport, until it is being repeated at the tables of the lords of the west. It is said that some of the sailors will swear to what they saw, however little those who hear them may credit it.

In the riverlands, the journey toward Riverrun has become a funeral procession. The remains of Ser Oscar Tully, Lord Kermit’s brother, are being carried home, and men and women have come to the roadside as word has spread, to pay their respects to the old knight who had survived the Dance only to die helping to settle the feuds of the clannish houses of Crackclaw Point.

The Hightowers’ visit to the riverlands has now been cut short. News of the deaths of his grandfather Lord Lyonel and his father Ser Bradwell, Lyonel’s heir, has reached Jon Hightower, now Lord of Oldtown. He and his new bride, Lady Lysa Tully, now Lady of Oldtown, have departed in haste for their new seat, accompanied by his grandmother Lady Samantha, the Dowager Lady of Oldtown.

Rumors from Dorne give the new lord further cause for haste. Lady Alia Dayne, the Lady of Starfall, is said to be near death, yet still threatens war against Oldtown in retaliation for the king’s attempt to force a marriage between the pretender Lyonel Dayne and Lady Aelinor Hightower, Ser Garmund’s youngest daughter. Taken under the protection of the lady’s own brother and supported by others of her kin—even to her own sister—Lady Alia still rejects the claim, and it is said that she means to take arms against Hightower lands and vassals if Sunspear will do nothing.

And so Westeros feels the cold hand of winter after a long summer, and some wonder what else ill may befall the realm…