Crows Before Lovers

The first thing I stole from Lord Tyrion was a lemon.

Not a coin. Not a letter. Not some jewel-encrusted trinket I could fence in Flea Bottom for a month's worth of bread. A lemon. The man had a bowl of them on his windowsill in the Tower of the Hand, shipped at absurd expense from Dorne, and I climbed three stories of ivy and sandstone to take one because I was fourteen and starving and the smell of citrus had been haunting my dreams for a week.

He caught me, of course.

"You know," he said, standing in the doorway with a candle in one hand and a crossbow in the other, "most thieves have the decency to steal things worth stealing."

I had the lemon in my teeth and one leg out the window. The crossbow wasn't pointed at me exactly, but it wasn't pointed at the ceiling either.

"It's worth something to me," I said, around the lemon.

He laughed. That was the thing about Tyrion Lannister. Everyone in King's Landing knew he was a monster, a kinslayer, a demon monkey. But nobody ever mentioned the laugh. It came out of him like water from a cracked jug, sudden and warm and impossible to predict.

"Keep it," he said. "And come back tomorrow. I have a proposition."

I should have run. I should have disappeared into the warren of streets below the Red Keep and never looked back. But I was fourteen and starving and nobody had ever offered me a proposition before. So I came back.

That was three years ago. I've been stealing for him ever since.

---

The morning everything changed, I was crouched in the rafters of the Great Hall, counting.

Sixty-three lords and ladies. Twelve guards. One king who couldn't stop scratching his neck. I'd been up there since before dawn, wedged between two beams with my knees drawn to my chest, and my legs had gone numb an hour ago. Tyrion wanted to know who was speaking to whom, who was passing notes, who was leaving early. Simple work. Boring work.

But then the doors opened and a woman walked in who made the whole room go quiet.

Not quiet like respect. Quiet like when you're walking through the Kingswood and a shadow passes overhead and every bird stops singing at once. She was tall, taller than most of the men, with skin the color of teak and hair shaved close to her skull. She wore armor. Not decorative armor, not the gilded nonsense the knights wore to tourneys. Real armor, scarred and dented and practical, and she wore it like a second skin.

She walked to the center of the hall and stopped. Didn't bow. Didn't curtsy. Just stood there, and every lord in the room was suddenly very interested in their wine cups.

"Your Grace," she said. Her voice carried. It didn't need to shout. "I've come to collect the debt you owe my people."

The king stopped scratching. "Lady Okoye. I wasn't aware the Crown owed anything to the Summer Isles."

"You burned our ships," she said. "Three years ago. During the siege. Your men set fire to the harbor at Jhala and called it collateral damage. Two hundred sailors dead. Forty vessels lost. We've been waiting for an apology ever since. We've decided to stop waiting."

I forgot to breathe. In the rafters, in the dust, I forgot to breathe.

Because here's the thing about King's Landing. Everyone talks. Everyone schemes. But nobody, not once in three years, had ever walked into the Great Hall and told the truth out loud. Not like that. Not with the whole room watching.

The king's face went through about six different expressions. I counted them. Confusion. Recognition. Anger. Fear. Something that might have been embarrassment. And then, finally, the flat mask of a man who's decided to pretend he didn't hear.

"The Crown does not negotiate with pirates," he said.

"I'm not a pirate," Lady Okoye said. "I'm a queen. And you're going to pay me what you owe."

---

Tyrion found me two hours later in the kitchens, stealing bread.

"Interesting morning," he said, hoisting himself onto a barrel across from me. He had to climb. It was almost funny, watching the Hand of the King scramble onto a barrel like a child. Almost.

"She's going to get herself killed," I said.

"Probably." He tore off a piece of my bread without asking. "But not today. Today she's going to stay in the Red Keep as an honored guest while the king tries to figure out how to make her disappear without starting a war with the Summer Isles."

"Can he?"

"Start a war? He's very good at it. He's started three already."

I chewed my bread and thought about the way she'd stood there. Straight-backed. Unafraid. I'd seen fear my whole life. I'd been raised on it, the way other children were raised on mother's milk. But Lady Okoye didn't have any fear in her. Or if she did, she'd buried it so deep even she couldn't find it.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

Tyrion smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who'd just thought of something clever and terrible.

"Because I need someone to watch her," he said. "Someone she won't notice. Someone who can get into places she doesn't expect."

"You want me to spy on a queen."

"I want you to observe a guest. There's a difference."

"There isn't."

"No," he admitted. "There isn't. But you're going to do it anyway, because you owe me, and because you're curious, and because you've never in your life been able to walk away from a good story."

I hated that he was right.

---

Her chambers were in the Sea Dragon Tower, three floors above the rookery. I got in through the window, which wasn't easy. The stone was slick with sea spray and the ledge was barely wide enough for my toes. But I'd climbed worse. I'd climbed the outside of the Sept of Baelor on a dare when I was twelve, and the only reason I didn't fall was that I was too scared to let go.

She was sitting at the table when I came through the window. Waiting.

"You're late," she said.

I froze. Half in, half out, one leg still dangling over the drop.

"I've been watching you for the past ten minutes," she said. "You're good. But you're not as good as you think you are."

"I'm not spying on you," I said.

"You're literally climbing through my window."

"I'm... inspecting the masonry. There's a crack in the foundation. Very dangerous."

She didn't laugh. But something moved in her face, a flicker, there and gone.

"Sit down," she said. "You're letting the cold in."

I sat. I don't know why. Maybe because she told me to and I was too surprised to argue. Maybe because I wanted to see what she'd do next.

Her chambers were sparse. A bed, a table, two chairs, a chest. No tapestries, no rugs, no gold. Just a sword leaning against the wall and a map spread across the table, weighted down with stones. I recognized the shape of Westeros, but it was covered in marks I didn't understand. Circles and lines and names written in a language I couldn't read.

"You're the Lannister's creature," she said. Not a question.

"I'm nobody's creature."

"Everyone's someone's creature. The only question is whether you know it."

She poured two cups of wine and pushed one toward me. I stared at it. In King's Landing, you didn't drink anything a stranger gave you. That was the first rule. The second rule was that there were no rules, only people who hadn't learned the first one yet.

"It's not poisoned," she said. "If I wanted you dead, I'd have pushed you out the window when you were hanging there."

Fair point.

I drank.

"Why are you here?" I asked. "Really. Not the speech about ships and debts. The real reason."

She studied me for a long moment. Her eyes were dark and steady and they didn't blink.

"Because I'm tired," she said. "I've been fighting for twenty years. I've buried three brothers and a husband and more friends than I can count. And I've learned that the only way to stop fighting is to make the people who started the fight understand that it will cost them more than they're willing to pay."

"And you think the king will understand that?"

"No." She smiled. It was a sad smile, tired around the edges. "But I think you might."

---

I didn't tell Tyrion about the conversation. I told him she was paranoid, kept to herself, didn't trust anyone. All true. All useless.

What I didn't tell him was that I went back the next night. And the night after that. And the night after that.

She taught me to read the map. Not just the words, but the spaces between them. She showed me where the Summer Isles ships had been burned, and where the survivors had washed ashore, and where the king's men had laughed and drunk wine while the bodies floated in the harbor. She told me about her husband, who'd died in the fire, and her brother, who'd died trying to save him.

She didn't ask me for anything. That was the strangest part. Everyone in King's Landing wanted something. Tyrion wanted information. The king wanted obedience. The lords wanted power. But Lady Okoye just wanted someone to listen.

"The boy who stole the lemon," she said one night, when I was sitting on her windowsill and she was sharpening her sword. "That's what they call you in the streets. Did you know?"

"I've heard it."

"It's a good name. Better than most. It means you're clever enough to take what you need and honest enough to admit it."

"I'm not honest."

"You're here," she said. "Talking to me. When you could be selling my secrets to the little lord who owns you. That's a kind of honesty."

"I told you. I'm nobody's creature."

She looked up from her sword. The candlelight caught the edge of the blade and threw it back into her eyes.

"Then prove it," she said. "When the time comes."

The time. I didn't know what she meant. But I felt it, somewhere in my chest, a door opening onto a room I hadn't known was there. A room full of questions I'd been too afraid to ask.

I went back to my pallet in the stables that night and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way she'd said it. Prove it. Like it was a test I'd already started taking without knowing.

The lemon was still on my windowsill. Dried out now, hard as a stone, but I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.

Some things you keep because they're worth something. Some things you keep because they remind you who you used to be.

And some things, I was starting to understand, you keep because they're the first step on a road you didn't know you were walking.

I didn't sleep that night. I lay awake and listened to the city breathing around me, ten thousand people dreaming ten thousand dreams, and I wondered which one of them was mine.