The storm came without warning.
One moment the Jade Serpent was cutting through calm waters, her red sails full with a following wind. The next, the sky turned black and the sea rose up like a living thing, hungry and vast.
Jon was in the cargo hold when the first wave struck.
He had earned his place aboard over the past three weeks—working alongside the crew, hauling ropes, scrubbing decks, doing whatever tasks Captain Mhagor assigned. He wasn't strong enough for the heavy labor, but he was quick to learn and quicker to obey, and the sailors had grudgingly accepted him.
"Ghost-boy," they called him, half-mocking and half-wary. "The Western stowaway who speaks our tongue."
Jon didn't mind the name. He'd been called worse.
Now, as the ship heaved beneath him and water began pouring through gaps in the hull, he understood that names wouldn't matter if he was dead.
"All hands!" someone screamed from above. "All hands on deck!"
Jon scrambled up the ladder, his bare feet slipping on wet wood. He emerged into chaos—sailors running everywhere, ropes snapping, sails tearing in winds that howled like wolves. The sky was a wall of black cloud shot through with lightning, and the waves...
The waves were mountains.
Jon had seen storms at sea before. The crossing from Westeros to Braavos had taught him to respect the ocean's moods. But this was different. This was the Jade Sea in fury, and it made everything he'd experienced before seem like children playing in puddles.
"The mast!" Captain Mhagor's voice cut through the wind. "Brace the mast!"
Jon ran to help. He grabbed a rope alongside three other sailors and pulled with everything he had, trying to steady the groaning timber. The hemp burned his palms. His arms screamed. The brand on his shoulder throbbed with old pain.
It wasn't enough.
The mast cracked with a sound like thunder. Jon threw himself aside as it fell, missing him by inches. One of the sailors wasn't so lucky—the timber caught him across the chest and carried him over the rail into the churning black water.
He didn't scream. The sea swallowed him before he had the chance.
"We're lost!" someone wailed. "The gods have abandoned us!"
"Silence!" Mhagor roared. "To the boats! Everyone to the—"
The next wave hit like a fist.
Jon felt himself lifted, weightless, spinning through salt and darkness. He tried to find up, tried to find air, but there was nothing—only the cold embrace of the sea and the distant rumble of thunder above the surface.
I'm going to die, he thought, with a strange calm. I crossed half the world, and I'm going to die in sight of Yi Ti.
Something struck his head. Pain exploded through his skull. The darkness deepened, swallowed him whole.
His last thought, as consciousness fled, was of Kerys's face. Her voice, telling him to be free.
I'm sorry, he thought. I tried.
Then there was nothing.
The storm had passed in the night, leaving the world washed clean and strange.
Mei Ling rode along the beach at dawn, her mare Zephyr picking carefully through the debris. She was supposed to be at her calligraphy lessons—Master Zhi would be furious—but the morning was too beautiful to waste on brush strokes and ink stones. The sky was the pale blue that came only after great storms, and the sea had retreated to a gentle whisper, as if exhausted by its own violence.
She was twelve years old, the daughter of General Kai of the Azure Dragon, and she had never been good at doing what she was told.
The wreckage appeared around the curve of the headland.
At first, Mei Ling thought it was just the usual flotsam—broken timbers, torn cloth, the sad remnants of some merchant vessel that had been caught by the typhoon. The Jade Sea claimed ships every storm season, and her father's soldiers would eventually arrive to collect what could be salvaged.
Then she saw the bodies.
They lay scattered across the beach like discarded dolls—sailors in the rough clothes of merchantmen, some tangled in rigging, some half-buried in sand. Crabs were already investigating, picking at wounds the storm had left.
Mei Ling's stomach lurched. She had seen death before—her mother had died when she was eight, and she had sat vigil by the body for three days—but this was different. This was violent. Wrong.
She should go back. Find the soldiers. Let adults handle this.
But something made her dismount and lead Zephyr closer, picking her way through the debris with careful steps.
One of the bodies moved.
Mei Ling froze. Her hand went to the knife at her belt—a gift from her father, who insisted she carry it even though she had never used it.
The body moved again. A small figure, smaller than the others, curled among the wreckage of what might have been a cargo crate. White hair—no, not white, pale blonde, almost silver—plastered to a face that was too young, too thin, too damaged to be an adult.
A child. A boy, perhaps her own age or younger.
And he was alive.
Mei Ling ran to him, her lessons forgotten, her fear forgotten, everything forgotten except the desperate need to help. She fell to her knees in the wet sand and pressed her fingers to his throat.
A pulse. Faint, thready, but there.
"Wake up," she said, then remembered he probably didn't speak Yi Tish. "Wake up, please, you have to wake up—"
The boy's eyes flickered open.
They were grey. Pale grey, like storm clouds, like the sky after rain. They looked at her without seeing, without understanding.
Then they closed again.
"No!" Mei Ling grabbed his shoulders, shook him. "Don't you dare die! I found you, you're not allowed to die!"
She looked around frantically. The beach was empty—no soldiers, no servants, no one to help. Zephyr stood a few yards away, ears pricked nervously.
Mei Ling made a decision.
She was small for her age, but years of riding had given her strength in her legs and core. She got her arms under the boy's shoulders and dragged him toward the horse, leaving a furrow in the sand. He was lighter than she expected—too light, she realized. She could feel his ribs through his soaked shirt.
Getting him onto Zephyr was harder. It took three tries, and she was gasping by the end, her arms shaking. But finally she had him draped across the saddle, his arms and legs dangling, his head lolling.
She swung up behind him, gathered the reins, and kicked Zephyr into motion.
"Hold on," she told the unconscious boy. "Just hold on."
She rode for the fortress like the demons of the Yellow Emperor were chasing her.
The soldiers met her at the gate.
"Lady Mei Ling!" Captain Wei's face went pale when he saw her burden. "What—where—"
"Shipwreck on the south beach," Mei Ling said, her voice steadier than she felt. "There are bodies. Many bodies. This one was alive. Get him to the healers. Now."
Wei hesitated—she could see him calculating, wondering if he should question her, wondering what her father would say—and then he nodded sharply.
"You heard the lady! Get a litter! Someone fetch Master Zhi!"
They lifted the boy from Zephyr's back with surprising gentleness. He moaned as they moved him, a small sound that made Mei Ling's heart clench. At least he was still alive.
"Careful with him," she said. "He's hurt badly."
"We can see that, my lady." Wei's voice was carefully neutral, but his eyes were on the boy's exposed shoulder, where his shirt had torn.
Mei Ling looked.
And saw the brand.
It was burned into the flesh, raised and ugly—a harpy with spread wings, clutching a chain in its talons. She knew that symbol. She had seen it in her father's intelligence reports, in the books Master Zhi made her study.
The mark of Slaver's Bay. The mark of property.
"He's a slave," Wei said quietly. "A Western slave, from the look of him."
"He's a boy," Mei Ling snapped. "And he's dying. Move."
They moved.
She followed the litter through the fortress gates, past the guardhouse and the armory, into the healing wing where Master Zhi kept his medicines and his secrets. The old healer was already waiting, his lined face expressionless as he took in the scene.
"A survivor from the wreck?"
"Yes. I found him on the beach." Mei Ling stayed close as they laid the boy on a pallet. "Can you help him?"
"That depends on what's wrong with him." Zhi's gnarled fingers moved over the boy's body, probing, assessing. "Hypothermia. Possible water in the lungs. Broken ribs—" his fingers found something, and the boy gasped even in unconsciousness, "—yes, at least two broken. Older fractures as well, improperly healed. And these—"
He pushed up the boy's shirt, revealing his back.
Mei Ling's breath caught.
Scars. Dozens of them, layered over each other like the strokes of a calligraphy brush. Whip marks. She recognized them from the books, from the drawings of what slavers did to their property.
"He has been beaten," Zhi said, his voice flat. "Many times, over many months. Some of these scars are recent. Others are older." He turned the boy's hands over, examining the fingers. "Two are crooked. Broken and set badly. And here—" he touched the brand again, "—Yunkai. The harpy of Yunkai."
"What does that mean?"
"It means this boy was a slave in the fighting pits of the Yellow City." Zhi's ancient eyes met hers. "It means he has survived things that would break most grown men. The question is whether he has enough strength left to survive this."
"Can you save him?"
"I can try." Zhi was already reaching for his medicines—herbs and tinctures in ceramic jars, needles of silver and copper, cloths and bandages. "But you should not be here, Lady Mei Ling. This is not—"
"I found him. I'm staying."
Zhi opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. Something in her face must have convinced him.
"Very well. Make yourself useful. Hold his head steady while I clear his lungs."
Mei Ling knelt beside the pallet and cradled the boy's head in her hands. He was so thin. So damaged. She could see the bones of his skull through the wet hair, could feel the fragility of him.
Who are you? she wondered. How did you end up here?
The boy's lips moved. A word, barely audible:
"Free..."
Then he went still, and Master Zhi began his work.
He dreamed of drowning.
The water was everywhere—cold and dark and endless, pressing in from all sides. He tried to swim, but his arms wouldn't move. Tried to breathe, but there was no air. Only the crushing weight of the sea, and somewhere above him, a light he couldn't reach.
You have to fight, a voice said. Marcus's voice, or maybe his own. You didn't come this far to die.
But he was so tired. So broken. The brand on his shoulder burned with remembered fire. The scars on his back ached with remembered blows. Every part of him hurt, and it would be so easy to just... let go.
Kerys told you to be free, the voice insisted. You promised her.
He had. He'd promised.
Jon reached for the light.
He woke in pieces.
First: warmth. He was warm, wrapped in something soft, and the shivering that had wracked his body for so long had finally stopped.
Second: pain. Everything hurt—his chest, his head, his shoulder. The brand throbbed with a dull fire. His ribs screamed every time he tried to breathe.
Third: voices. Unfamiliar, speaking a language he knew but couldn't quite grasp. Yi Tish. They were speaking Yi Tish.
Yi Ti, he thought. I made it.
He opened his eyes.
The room was small and clean, with walls of pale wood and a ceiling of painted tiles. Sunlight filtered through paper screens, casting soft shadows. He was lying on a low pallet covered in silk—actual silk, cool and smooth against his skin.
Someone sat beside him. A girl, perhaps twelve years old, with black hair pulled back in a simple tail and dark eyes that widened when she saw him looking.
"You're awake," she said. Her Yi Tish was quick and musical, and Jon had to concentrate to understand. "You've been sleeping for three days. We thought... I thought..."
"Where?" His voice came out as a croak. His throat felt like he'd swallowed sand.
"The fortress of the Azure Dragon. On the coast of Yi Ti." The girl reached for a cup and held it to his lips. "Drink. Slowly."
Water. Clean, cool water. Jon drank in small sips, feeling it soothe his throat, and the girl watched him with an intensity that made him uncomfortable.
"What's your name?" she asked.
Jon hesitated. He had been so many things—a bastard, a runaway, a slave. He had worn so many names.
"Jon," he said finally. "My name is Jon."
"I'm Mei Ling." She smiled, and it transformed her face from merely pretty to something warmer. "I found you on the beach. You were almost dead."
"Thank you." The words felt inadequate. "You saved my life."
"Master Zhi saved your life. I just... carried you." Her eyes drifted to his shoulder, where the brand was surely visible above the blanket. "You were a slave."
It wasn't a question.
"Yes." There was no point in lying. "In Yunkai."
"But you escaped."
"I ran." The memories pressed in—Kerys on the cross, the whip across his back, the endless days in the fighting pits. "I've been running for a long time."
Mei Ling was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "My father is General Kai. He commands this fortress. When you're well enough, he'll want to meet you."
Fear spiked through Jon's chest. A general. Authority. The last time he'd been brought before someone in authority, he'd been sold on an auction block.
"I can work," he said quickly. "Whatever you need. I can read and write. I can—"
"You can rest." Mei Ling's voice was firm, almost stern. "You're not a slave here. Yi Ti doesn't allow slavery. Whatever happened to you before... it's over."
Jon wanted to believe her. Gods, he wanted to believe her.
But he'd learned, in the pits and the pens and the endless miles between here and Winterfell, that nothing was ever truly over. Safety was an illusion. Freedom was a lie.
Kerys thought she was free, he thought. And they crucified her.
Still, he was alive. He was warm. He was in Yi Ti, where Marcus's fragments said masters lived who could teach him to use the power locked inside him.
For now, that would have to be enough.
"Rest," Mei Ling said again, softer now. "I'll come back tomorrow."
She rose and moved toward the door. At the threshold, she paused.
"Jon?"
"Yes?"
"I'm glad you didn't die."
Then she was gone, and Jon was alone with his pain and his memories and the first faint stirring of something he'd almost forgotten how to feel.
Hope.
Master Zhi was a puzzle Jon couldn't solve.
The old healer came every morning to check on his patient—prodding wounds, changing bandages, forcing bitter medicines down Jon's throat. He rarely spoke, and when he did, his words were clipped and precise.
But his eyes... his eyes watched Jon with an intensity that made him nervous. Like he was looking for something. Like he was waiting.
"Your ribs are healing well," Zhi said on the seventh day, pressing fingers against Jon's side. "The hypothermia has passed. Your lungs are clear."
"When can I leave the bed?"
"When I say you can." Zhi's fingers moved to Jon's back, tracing the whip scars. "These are old. Some are very old. You've been beaten since childhood."
Jon said nothing.
"And these—" Zhi's fingers found the brand, "—Yunkai. The fighting pits. How long were you there?"
"Nearly a year."
"At your age." It wasn't a question. "How old are you? Eight? Nine?"
"Eight." Jon thought about it. "Maybe closer to nine. I've lost track."
"Lost track." Zhi's voice was flat. "You've lost track of your own age."
"Time is different when you're a slave." Jon met the old man's eyes. "When every day is the same. When you don't expect to see tomorrow."
Zhi held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded, once.
"You have strength," he said. "Not in your body—your body is damaged, perhaps permanently. But here—" he touched Jon's forehead, "—and here." His finger moved to Jon's chest, above his heart. "That is rarer than you know."
"I just... survived. That's all."
"Surviving is a choice. Every day, you choose to live instead of die. That takes strength." Zhi sat back on his heels. "General Kai wishes to speak with you. Tomorrow, when you are stronger. Do not be afraid—he is a hard man, but a fair one."
"And after that?"
"After that..." Zhi's eyes flickered with something Jon couldn't read. "We will see."
General Kai was not what Jon had expected.
The stories Mei Ling told painted a picture of a legendary warrior—a man who had won a hundred battles, who had served three emperors, who was feared and respected across the Golden Empire. Jon had imagined someone massive, scarred, terrifying.
Instead, the man who summoned him to his study was slight and grey, with the weathered face of a scholar rather than a soldier. He sat behind a desk covered in maps and documents, and when he looked up at Jon, his eyes were calm and assessing.
"Sit," he said.
Jon sat. He kept his back straight and his hands on his knees, the way the trainers in Yunkai had taught him.
"My daughter tells me you are called Jon." Kai's Yi Tish was formal, precise. "A Western name. Where are you from?"
"The North." Jon saw no reason to lie. "A place called Winterfell. Very far from here."
"And yet here you are. In Yi Ti. Bearing the brand of a Yunkai slave." Kai's fingers drummed against the desk. "How does a Northern boy end up in the fighting pits of Slaver's Bay?"
Jon told him. Not everything—he said nothing about Marcus, nothing about the breathing techniques, nothing about the power that slept inside him—but enough. Winterfell. The flight south. Braavos. The ship to Volantis. Maelor's men. The brand. The pits. The escape.
Kai listened without interrupting. When Jon finished, he was silent for a long moment.
"You've had a difficult journey," he said finally. "More difficult than most men twice your age. And yet you're still alive."
"I'm stubborn."
"Stubborn." Something that might have been amusement flickered across Kai's face. "Yes. I imagine you are."
He rose and moved to the window, looking out over the courtyard below. Jon caught a glimpse of soldiers drilling, of servants hurrying past, of Mei Ling watching from a balcony.
"I could send you away," Kai said. "Give you money and supplies and point you toward the nearest city. You would not be the first refugee to pass through these gates."
Jon's heart clenched. "But?"
"But my daughter has taken an interest in you. And Master Zhi believes you have... potential." Kai turned back to face him. "He says there is something unusual about you. Something he cannot quite name."
Jon said nothing. His mouth had gone dry.
"I am going to make you an offer," Kai continued. "You may refuse—you are not a slave here, and you will not be treated as one. But I believe you should accept."
"What offer?"
"A place in my household. Food, shelter, education. Mei Ling needs a companion her own age, and I need—" he paused, choosing his words carefully, "—I need young people with fire in them. The Empire is changing. The old ways are dying. We need new blood."
"And in return?"
"In return, you learn. You study. You become strong." Kai's eyes met Jon's, and there was steel in them now. "I don't know what you're running toward, Jon Snow. But I know you're running toward something. Perhaps I can help you find it."
Jon thought of Winterfell, so far away now it might as well be a dream. He thought of Kerys, telling him to be free. He thought of the power sleeping in his bones, waiting to be awakened.
"Yes," he said. "I accept."
Kai nodded, as if he had expected nothing else.
"Then welcome to the Azure Dragon. May you find what you're looking for."
He reached across the desk and offered his hand. Jon took it.
The grip was strong. The eyes were kind.
For the first time in years, Jon Snow felt like he might have found a home.