The wind was cold, carrying the salty damp peculiar to the depths of the Narrow Sea, the kind that seeped into the marrow.
Mist lay over the sea like a gray-white, drifting shroud.
Stannis Baratheon stood on the foredeck, his back ramrod straight, like a stone statue draped in an iron-gray cloak.
Both hands rested on the cold gunwale, his knuckles slightly white from the pressure.
His gaze pierced the thin mist, fixed relentlessly on that direction...
The direction of his home, his seat, now occupied by the enemy, where his wife and daughter were imprisoned.
The sailors and soldiers on deck deliberately softened their movements and lowered even their conversations to murmurs.
The air radiating from the king-a mixture of exhaustion, agitation, rage, and some deeper struggle-was more suffocating than the cold sea wind.
They had just won a bizarre, bloodless "victory," absorbing a vast army. Their spirits should have been soaring as they marched straight for King's Landing.
But a letter pleading for help from Dragonstone had tightened around them like a binding curse, halting every step forward and dragging them back into these cold, fogbound, perilous waters.
Footsteps approached from behind, light but unmistakable on the silent deck.
They were neither the heavy boots of a sailor nor the clanking armor of an officer, but something softer, with a more... uncanny rhythm.
Stannis did not turn.
"Without those practical yet shortsighted counsels lingering in your ears, Your Grace will hear the true god's guidance more clearly and see the path revealed by the flames."
Melisandre's voice sounded low and soft, with a strange resonance, as though it came not from her throat but from the ruby at her breast.
At some point, she had taken her place just behind his side. Against the gray-white mist and iron-gray