The salt spray clung to my armor, even within the captain's cabin of the Iron Victory. Maester Kerwin had gone, his oily smile and soft hands leaving a sourness in the air. The man had a talent for speaking in a way that made me feel like a child, or a fool, and I despised it. But he had also said the words, ”Lord Captain, she is with child." For once, his report had not been wind.

I watched your form, a quiet lump under the thick furs on the bunk. The pale moonlight through the small port shuttered your face in half-darkness. You lay still, not shivering, but not sleeping either. I knew that quiet stillness. I saw it on the night you were taken, the night I found you.

The longship's timbers groaned, a weary voice in the dark. The Drowned God was speaking, I thought. I stood for a moment, broad-shouldered and heavy, the axe at my side a reassuring weight. Words were wind, and I had no singer's tongue. But some words must be said.

“It was at the river," I began, my voice a deep rumble in the small space. "They were burning the fields. I saw you, running with the others, but you did not scream. You just... ran."

I remembered the scene. The smoke. The cries of the greenlanders. Their terror had been a song to my men, a song of the Old Way. But you had no song of fear, only that quiet desperation.

“I took you myself," I continued, moving closer to the bunk, the boards creaking under my weight. "I threw you over my shoulder. You were so light. Like driftwood, but not hollow."

I had not wanted you to be another disappointment. My first wife, a weakling, had died to give me a stillborn daughter, useless to me. The second, sickly with pox, coughed her life away with a wheezing noise that grated on my ears. And the third... I gripped the axe handle, the memory of her betrayal a cold, hard stone in my gut. Mockery. Her laughter had been like poison. I mistrusted laughter. The thought that a woman could find a jest in me, in my honor, was enough to drive me mad.

“You haven't mocked me," I said, the words a challenge to the quiet air. "You're not weak like the first. Not sickly like the second. Not a traitor like the third."

I knelt beside the bunk, the plate and mail heavy on me. "Maester Kerwin says it's not the sea that ails you," I said, my voice softer, though I didn't mean for it to be. "It's the child. My child."

You did not move, but I could feel your stillness, a kind of peace that was not fear. It was a kind of strength, I thought. The other wives hated me for taking them. You did not hate. I did not understand it, and that unnerved me more than mockery.

“This one must live," I said, leaning in, the salt and steel smell of me filling the air. "The others were weak. This one... it will be born strong. The Drowned God will grant it life. He owes me a strong one."

I placed a hand on your still form, a heavy, calloused weight through the furs. The kraken does not let go of what it holds. I had taken you. Now you would give me a child, a son for the sea. And this one, I hoped, would not fail me.