Chapter 2: THE BLACKSMITH'S SON
Three days in, and Naelarion was running.
Not the contemplative kind. The kind where three men with skinning knives chased him through Flea Bottom's intestinal alleyways because he'd spent the morning asking too many questions about their operation near the fishmarket.
He vaulted a pile of rotting crates. His feet hit slick cobblestone and he skidded, shoulder slamming a wall of damp brick, and kept moving. Behind him: boots, cursing, the wet scrape of iron.
The alley branched. Left went toward the harbor — open ground, bad option. Right dove deeper into the warrens.
He went right.
Three days of mapping Flea Bottom had given him the bones of the district's anatomy. The gangs ran it like organs in a body: the Mudlarks owned the docks and everything that came off the boats. A Lyseni crew managed the brothels and the poppy trade near Silk Street. And the Ratcatchers — the smallest, the weakest, the most desperate — controlled the sewer networks and the stolen goods that moved through them.
Three days of observation. Three days of sleeping two hours a night and eating whatever he could steal or trade labor for. Three days of the Mandate's countdown ticking in the corner of his vision like a second pulse.
[26 DAYS, 9 HOURS REMAINING.]
The alley narrowed to a gap between buildings barely wide enough for his shoulders. He squeezed through, skin scraping stone, and emerged onto Eel Alley — a cramped lane where tanners and metalworkers competed for the worst smell in the district.
The forge was halfway down. An open-fronted shop where heat billowed into the street like breath from a furnace, and a young man the size of a draft horse stood working iron with a hammer that looked like a child's toy in his grip.
Naelarion didn't choose the forge. The alley chose it for him. He staggered through the open front and caught himself on the edge of the anvil as the three knifemen appeared at the alley's mouth.
The blacksmith looked up. Dark hair, dark eyes, a face weathered older than his years by forge-heat. Arms like dock pilings under a leather apron stained with soot and sweat. He didn't ask who Naelarion was or why he was bleeding from a scrape on his temple or why three armed men had followed him here.
He picked up the hammer.
Not a fighting stance. Just a man holding his tool, standing in his shop, watching three strangers decide whether they wanted to cross his threshold.
They decided they didn't.
The tallest one spat on the cobblestones, muttered something about silver-haired gutter rats, and the three of them dissolved back into the alley's shadows.
Naelarion let his grip on the anvil loosen. His hands were trembling — adrenaline and three days of inadequate food conspiring against him.
"You bleed on the iron," the blacksmith said, "you're cleaning it."
"Fair."
"Who are you running from?"
"The better question is who I'm running toward. That answer's still forming."
The blacksmith studied him with the uncomplicated directness of a man who evaluated materials for a living: useful or not, strong or weak, worth his time or waste of it.
"Silver hair."
"My mother's gift."
"Valyrian."
"Waters. Bastard, if the distinction matters."
"It doesn't." The blacksmith went back to his iron. The hammer fell with a rhythm that vibrated in Naelarion's chest.
"I can work bellows," Naelarion said.
"Why would I need bellows worked?"
"Because your apprentice quit — the hook where his apron hung is empty and the dust pattern shows it's been a week. You've been managing the forge alone, which means your output's dropped by a third and your shoulder's getting worse from compensating."
The hammer paused.
"I pay attention," Naelarion added. "It's the only currency I've got."
The blacksmith — Hugh, Naelarion would learn within the hour — pointed the hammer toward the bellows with an expression balanced between suspicion and the grudging acceptance of a man whose shoulder genuinely did hurt.
Six hours on the bellows broke something open in Naelarion's arms and built something new in its place. The work was savage and monotonous: pump, hold, pump, hold, maintain the rhythm Hugh's metal demanded. His palms blistered within the first hour. The blisters tore by the second. He wrapped his hands in rags and kept pumping.
Hugh watched him work the way a man watches an animal he hasn't classified yet.
At the fourth hour, Hugh pulled a blade from the quench tank and held it to the light. Naelarion paused the bellows.
"There's a crack. Midway down the spine, left side."
Hugh's expression didn't change, but his eyes sharpened. He turned the blade. Ran his thumb along the spine. Found it — hairline, nearly invisible, the kind of flaw that passed inspection and then broke six months later when a guardsman actually needed it.
"Most people wouldn't see that."
"Most people aren't looking."
Hugh set the flawed blade aside. Pulled another piece from the forge. Went back to work without comment, but the rhythm between them had shifted — from tolerance to something adjacent to respect.
When the light through the forge's opening went amber and then grey, Hugh set his hammer down and disappeared into the back. He returned with a half-loaf of dark bread and broke it in two without ceremony.
Naelarion took his half. The bread was dense, slightly stale, and it was the best thing he'd eaten in this world.
"I can come back tomorrow," he said.
"You'll come back tomorrow," Hugh corrected, and the difference was permission versus expectation, which meant something here. "Sunrise. Don't be late."
"What do I owe you for the bread?"
Hugh gave him a look that managed to be both flat and faintly insulted.
"You worked for it."
The words were simple. A transaction, nothing more — six hours of labor for a half-loaf and a place to stand. But something in Naelarion's chest registered the exchange as the first clean thing that had happened to him in this world. No angle. No leverage. No currency but effort, honestly given and honestly repaid.
He filed it. Moved on.
Mara's tavern crouched on the corner of Mudgate Lane like a drunk leaning on a wall. Inside, the air was thick with tallow smoke and the sour perfume of ale gone warm. The tavern owner herself — broad, scarred across one eyebrow, with forearms that could arm-wrestle any man in her establishment — watched Naelarion with the professional assessment of a woman who'd survived Flea Bottom by knowing exactly who was dangerous and who was pretending.
"You want information," she said, before he'd opened his mouth.
"I want to clean your kitchen. If information happens to be in the kitchen, I'll take that too."
Mara almost smiled.
He scrubbed pots for two hours. Mara talked while she inventoried her stock — not because she was generous with information but because a silver-haired boy who scrubbed without complaint was a novelty worth investing in.
The Mudlarks: forty men, maybe fifty, run by a dock boss named Ferren who'd lost two fingers to a cargo hook and made up for it with absolute control of the waterfront. They taxed every boat that unloaded at Flea Bottom's unofficial piers. Strong, organized, violent when crossed.
The Lyseni crew: smaller, richer, quieter. They ran the brothels near Silk Street and the poppy dens under the Sept of Baelor's shadow. Their leader was a woman named Salla — Lysene-born, dark-haired, who'd come to King's Landing as a pleasure worker and clawed her way to ownership of three establishments. She dealt in bodies and forgetfulness and didn't tolerate competition.
The Ratcatchers: bottom of the hierarchy. Twenty men, give or take. Their leader, Tomm, had carved out the sewer networks as territory because nobody else wanted them. They moved stolen goods, ran a protection racket on the poorest of the poor, and survived by being small enough that the Mudlarks and Lyseni didn't bother crushing them.
Naelarion cataloged the information in the analytical framework that had earned him promotions in another life: three organizations, three revenue streams, three sets of vulnerabilities. The Mudlarks were strongest. The Lyseni were richest. The Ratcatchers were weakest.
Start at the bottom. Work upward.
He was drying the last pot when the text pulsed:
[INTELLIGENCE NETWORK: MAPPED. TERRITORIAL ANALYSIS: COMPLETE.]
[+5 BLOOD POINTS.]
[BP: 5. THE MANDATE REWARDS PREPARATION.]
Five points. The first reward, cold and transactional, deposited in a ledger he couldn't see by an entity he couldn't name. Naelarion set the pot on its hook and studied the text until it faded.
Five points for knowing the shape of Flea Bottom's power structure. The Mandate valued intelligence. Good. Intelligence was the one asset that multiplied when spent.
He left Mara's with a nod and a promise to return tomorrow. The streets of Flea Bottom swallowed him — the noise, the stink, the absolute indifference of ten thousand people living on top of each other in organized misery.
Back in his hovel, he sat on the floor and flexed his hands. The blisters from the bellows were already different — the raw, weeping skin was pink and tight, healing faster than it had any right to. The torn edges had sealed. New skin was forming beneath, smoother than the damage should have allowed after just one evening.
He pressed his thumb against the worst blister. It held. The skin underneath felt tougher than what had been there this morning.
The body was changing. Something in the Valyrian blood, or something the Mandate was doing, or both — accelerating repair, hardening what had been soft. Phase 1, the initial text had said. Dormant abilities.
This didn't feel dormant. It felt like a machine starting up, system by system, in a body that hadn't asked for the upgrade.
He pulled his hand back and stared at the new skin in the thin light from his cracked window. Pink, smooth, already tougher. The blisters hadn't just healed — they'd been replaced.
Twenty-six days on the clock. An ally who didn't know he was an ally yet. A map of power he couldn't yet seize. And a body rebuilding itself according to rules he hadn't been given.
Naelarion closed his fist and opened it again, testing the grip, measuring the strength.
Tomorrow he'd go back to the forge. The day after, he'd start learning to fight in it.
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