The Wizard of Fury Chapter 8

Harry searches for an escape from Pyke as the King's siege begins.

Under the cover of darkness, Harry crept through the castle of Pyke. The door to his cell sat unlocked thanks to his limited magical ability, but he had no time to bask in the pride he felt in his chest. He needed to escape before anyone realised that he was missing. The last thing he wished for was to encounter Euron Greyjoy again, or King Greyjoy for that matter. The older man appeared weak and broken, but he was still ironborn. Tales of their dark ways spread throughout Westeros, and it wouldn’t surprise Harry if King Greyjoy decided to have him gutted atop the parapets of the castle for the royal army to witness.

 The spiral staircase of the Salt Tower offered nowhere to hide. Harry crept down the stairs as silently as he could, but his footfalls still echoed down the bare stairwell. The meagre meal he’d eaten earlier in the day had been good at the time, but he needed more sustenance to fully recover from his ordeal. His body was weak and feverish, and that made him sloppy. But he wasn’t going to sit around and wait to be killed. His best chance was this brazen escape plan.

Harry kept expecting to find a man standing guard somewhere within the Salt Tower, but it seemed as though it was mostly abandoned. Being far away from the main keep and the curtain walls that guarded the castle meant that few soldiers were lingering here, but that didn’t extend to the servants that were needed to maintain a castle of this size. He could get caught out at any moment by one of them, which was why he knew that he needed to find a disguise.

As he reached the first landing, he paused to listen against the oaken door that stood closed to him. Over the wind whistling in through the cracks in the walls, he heard the faint crackling of a fire and nothing more.

Gingerly, Harry pushed the door open. He knew it was a risk stepping into a room he couldn’t see into, but what other choice did he have? There were bound to be more people down at the ground floor, and they’d spot him out in an instant. He either needed a disguise or a weapon to keep himself safe.

A warm glow filled the room that Harry crept inside. A crudely made brazier sat in the centre of the circular room, surrounded by cheaply-made beds. It reminded Harry greatly of his dorm back at Hogwarts, only much less nice without the house-elves to keep it clean. The room was abandoned save for a single dark figure laying down in one of the beds with their back to Harry.

Upon seeing this person, Harry hesitated half a heartbeat before he continued forward slowly. He was crouched low to the ground to help steady his balance and keep himself from making as much noise as possible. His eyes scanned the room wildly for anything he could use or wear.

There was an old wooden chest left open nearby. Harry swept up towards it and began quietly rifling through the dense fabrics within. The clothes were meant for an adult male. The trousers were far too long for him to wear, and the loose shirt would have fit a man three times Harry’s size.

Harry had to bite back a growl of frustration. This was a hopeless endeavour.

No, it wasn’t. He had to remind himself of that. He couldn’t get bogged down in the mire of self doubt and gloom. He was Harry Potter… Harry Baratheon. He had just performed proper wandless magic for the first time in his life. It was a feat that had seemed impossible to him for years. If he could overcome that trial, then he could overcome this one.

Harry abandoned the chest and returned his gaze around the room. He was looking for any little glint, any sign of something that could provide him some form of safety.

And then he saw it.

The cloak was hung up near an open window. It smelt of salt and sweat, and it was damp as anything, but it would do. Harry carefully pulled it from the hook it was nestled upon and threw it over his shoulders. The cloak was much too long for him. The hem licked the back of his calves, and he had to bundle up the excess fabric in front of his torso to prevent it from flapping wildly in the wind, but it would do.

Good, at least he had a disguise now. He could pass as a servant travelling from tower to tower across the swinging rope bridges that connected them, using the cloak to provide some meagre form of cover from the salty spray of the sea. Hopefully, with the battle taking everyone’s attention, he would be able to slip by soldiers without much notice.

But then came the next issue: where was he to go? He couldn’t exactly slip through the lines of battle without risking being cut down by either side. Even if he identified himself to the soldiers of the royal army, the heat of a bloody battle could addle a man’s mind. They could cut Harry down before they even realised what they had done. Perhaps his best bet was by the sea. If he could find a little dinghy or some other small vessel, he could navigate through the waters and find one of his father’s ships to capture him and bring him aboard. But he didn’t know how many Greyjoy ships were out at sea doing battle right now.

No matter where he went, there was bound to be trouble. Harry wished he had a portkey, something to whisk him away from here to safety, but he wouldn’t even know where to begin with something like that.

At the very least, he knew that he couldn’t stay in this tower. As soon as an errant guard or servant realised that he was no longer in his cell, the tower would be scoured from top to bottom in search of him. He needed to get elsewhere in the castle. Then, he could decide his plan of action.

Creeping back out of the room as quietly as he could, Harry moved down the staircase at a faster pace than before. If he kept creeping around slowly then he was bound to look more suspicious than he already was. He needed to appear confident, like he belonged here, like this castle was familiar to him.

As he neared the ground floor, he began to hear more sounds of activity. It wasn’t long before he caught sight of a scullery maid hurrying up the staircase past him. His breath caught in his chest when the woman rounded the corner, but all she did was glance up at him for the briefest moment before returning to her task at hand. Evidently, his short stature alone wasn’t enough to draw much interest from the servants working here.

A small dining hall sat on the ground floor of the Salt Tower. Another set of stairs cut into the earth below, presumably leading to the kitchens. Four men dressed in Greyjoy livery sat at one long, wooden table with plates of food and mugs of ale in front of them. Their helmets sat on the benches next to them and their spears rested against the wall nearby. Harry spotted dirks sheathed at the men’s hips, but he didn’t dare try to snag one so brazenly from them.

Although…

The Unlocking Charm had worked for him, albeit with a great deal of force and focus. He’d learnt the Summoning Charm for the first task of the Triwizard Tournament. He still remembered the sensation of it viscerally. Could he manage it?

The guards weren’t alone in the dining hall. A dozen or more servants, some at work and some at break, lingered about too. There was a heaviness in the air due to the rumblings of war coming from outside. It was easy to hear the sounds of horns blaring, men fighting, and commands being issued. Every so often, a loud crash would signal the sound of a boulder being catapulted into the castle’s walls.

“If things get bad, hide in the kitchens,” an older woman said to a younger one. The girl was shivering and jumped each time a loud boom came from outside, making a couple of the guards sneer. But Harry spotted one of the guards who actually seemed sympathetic to the poor girl. He gave her what Harry was sure was meant to be a reassuring smile, but it came out all crooked and wrong. The girl trembled in fright and looked away from the man down to her lap.

Harry’s eyes flickered around quickly. This was his moment.

“Accio,” he murmured under his breath.

The dirk at the guard’s waist quivered, and the guard quickly planted his hand on it to still it in place. He glanced behind him, as if expecting a pickpocket had just tried to snag it from him, but luckily Harry was across the hall from him.

He couldn’t risk getting caught. Not right now. So, he turned and left out from the front door onto a rope bridge.

The winds were strong tonight. They made the bridge sway back and forth like the rocking of a ship. Luckily, Harry had several weeks worth of recent practice balancing himself on a ship’s deck. He grabbed hold of the railing and shifted his body weight in time with the motion of the bridge until he had a solid feel for it. Then, he started forward towards the large keep ahead of him.

“Bring more pitch to the walls!” A man shouted from high above Harry. He glanced up to see an open window above, glowing orange from the torchlight within. A dozen or more shadows of men passed by as they rushed to fulfil command.

As Harry staggered his way to the end of the bridge, the door in front of him was thrown open.

“Out of the way,” a guard said roughly as he shoved past Harry.

Harry yelped as his foot skittered off of the edge of the bridge. He leaned his body into the railing and rebounded himself back, but his path caught him right in the way of another guard.

“The Others take you, boy,” the second guard snapped. He cuffed Harry upside his head with his fist as he brushed past him. “Watch where you’re going or I’ll know you straight into the sea.”

“Sorry,” Harry mumbled as he scrambled in through the door they’d just left.

This was the other large keep he’d been through. It sat just beyond the Great Keep, where the throne room was. He’d have to choose if he’d continue on into there or divert into one of the other towers for some safety.

The corridor he stepped into was lined with barrels. Some were filled with spears and weapons, others with arrows, and some were sealed tightly shut. A few servants lingered about, but none close enough to hear him.

“Accio dagger,” he said louder, under the cover of the sounds of battle.

He realised his mistake half a second later when a dagger came flying straight towards him. The freshly-sharpened point was headed right for his hand, and it was only thanks to his years playing Quidditch that he had the quick reflexes to move out of the way and then grab the dagger by the hilt. He obscured it within his cloak, clinging to it like his life depended on it.

Now that he was armed, a burst of confidence filled Harry. He could do this! He could escape from this place and get back to his father!

He hurried along the corridor, doing his best to follow the path that he’d been taken down. He wove his way around the outskirts of the keep, dodging out of the way of each and every man and woman he crossed paths with. He thought he was going to get out.

And then disaster struck.

There was a loud rumble before the screams began. Harry paused near a window to look out and watch as a tall tower near the curtain wall that was holding back the invading forces began to tip sideways. There was a gaping hole in the middle of it, and the stones collapsed in a cascading failure. There were people still within the tower who were being thrown about. A man even leapt out of one of the highest windows towards the curtain wall. He didn’t make it.

The stones beneath Harry’s feet trembled as the tower came crashing down, smashing straight through the curtain wall. For a moment, he feared that he too was about to plummet to his death if the floor gave out beneath him, but the stones held firm.

Any thoughts about continuing down the path he came from ended when he saw the royal army break through the breach in the curtain wall. A man with a flaming sword charged through first, followed by another man and then another. It looked like the ocean came flooding in through a broken dam as hundreds of men charged towards the Great Keep of Pyke.

Suddenly, a flurry of activity went up at the Great Keep. Countless soldiers came streaming out of it, rushing down the bridge towards the keep that Harry was in. Amid the chaos, Harry spotted King Balon Greyjoy at the head of the men, armed with a longsword and surrounded by fierce-looking warriors. He was retreating to a safer position to hold up at, and he was running right towards Harry.

Harry did the first thing he thought of, which was to duck into the first open doorway he found. He charged forward, crashing into someone and knocking them to the floor. He didn’t stop to help them though—he needed to get his distance between him and the king, lest he be recognised and captured again. Harry sprinted past, dashing blindly through this great hall he found himself in until he reached a staircase on the far side.

Up or down?

Logically, he knew that it was more likely for the king and his men to hole up on a higher level. With the design of the stairwell, it’d be far easier for them to swing their swords downward at the invading forces charging up the stairs. However, he didn’t like the idea of fleeing down into the dungeons below. He’d be trapped like a rat down there, and he knew from his time at Dragonstone as to just how maze-like the lower levels of a castle could be.

So, for better or for worse, Harry stormed up the stairs as fast as his feet would allow him. He struggled to not trip over his oversized cloak, but he scrambled whenever he did stumble. All that mattered was that he found a safe place to reassess his situation in.

To his horror, the upper floor was filled with guards preparing for battle. It was only due to their panic that none of them cared to look at Harry too closely, and he was too terrified to turn around and look more suspicious than he was. He pressed through the gaps between the soldiers until he found another room to slip into.

The dimly-lit and drafty solar he stepped into didn’t have much for protection, but at least it was vacant. Harry closed the door behind him, cursing the fact that he had nothing to bar the door with. The solar was ringed with bookshelves containing letters and ledgers. A large weathered desk sat in the centre of the room with a hard, iron chair behind it. A threadbare cushion was the only comfort that chair offered. Other than that, the room was shockingly empty.

If this was the state of the ironborn’s premier castle, then it was no wonder that they were fighting for more. Dragonstone was considered austere compared to places like King’s Landing, Sunspear, or Storm’s End, but it seemed a luxurious place compared to Pyke.

There were a few small cabinets around the room. Harry hurried over towards them, opening each one up in the hopes that they would be empty. One contained firewood for the empty fireplace, another contained more scrolls and parchment, but one contained only dishes and linens. Harry managed to push the dishes and mugs to one side of the cabinet and climbed in the other side with the linens. It was a tight fit, and he had to stretch his legs out over the mugs, but he managed to close the cabinet up.

Several seconds of near pitch-black silence gave Harry the chance to catch his breath. His adrenaline had him running far hotter than he’d expected—he hadn’t even noticed the fact that he was nearly out of breath. He shed his oversized cloak but kept clutching the dagger to his chest, ready to use it if need be.

The sounds of war drew closer and closer as the minutes passed. Before long, Harry could hear the singing of steel and the cries of dying men. The keep was an endless rumble of pounding footsteps and warring men. He heard women scream as they fled or were cut down by an overeager soldier.

This was what real battle was like. His battle in the graveyard with Voldemort had been terrifying, but it paled in comparison with the carnage he was hearing. He couldn’t imagine witnessing it all. Men would either break down or become numb to it and continue on. He wondered which he’d be.

When the fighting reached the floor he was on, Harry’s heart rate picked back up again. He was close enough to the top of the stairs that when the ironborn started to pull back, he knew that it was only a matter of time before someone burst into the room he was in.

Maybe it was foolish to do so, but Harry opened up the cabinet just a crack. Under the moonlight, he’d be near impossible to see, but he needed to know what was going on in the room.

It was only a minute later when someone burst inside. They were wounded, panting heavily, and under the cover of darkness, Harry couldn’t make them out.

“Fucking bastards,” the man mumbled as he staggered over to the large desk. He ducked behind it and started rifling through the drawers, only to come out with a bottle filled with a dark-coloured liquor inside of it. He yanked out the cork stopper and threw it across the room before taking a deep swig of the liquor. He sighed greedily, wiping his mouth clean and slamming the bottle down onto the desk. “We take what we want. We follow the Old Way. That’s what Uncle Euron always says, isn’t it?”

As the man laughed darkly and took another drink, Harry’s breathing hitched. This was Euron Greyjoy’s nephew? Was he a prince then? Or one of Balon and Euron’s other siblings’ child?

There was a loud crash outside the room which made the man jump. He pulled out a longsword from a scabbard on his back and readied himself. He slowly moved around the desk, moving right into the moonlight.

The man was wearing plate armour that looked like it was stained with black ink. Only, it didn’t quite look right to be ink. His open-faced helmet showed off the face of a young man. He had dark stubble across his chin and an ugly sneer on his lips. His nose was crooked, like someone had punched it out of place and it’d never been set properly again.

Someone kicked the door open. A man with a long face, brown hair, and dark grey eyes. He wielded a longsword in one hand and a dagger in the other. Harry knew who he was instantly. He’d heard plenty of rants from his father about what his Uncle Robert and his closest friend, Lord Eddard Stark, had gotten up to during Robert’s Rebellion. The direwolf sigil on his armour gave him away cleanly, even if his appearance didn’t.

“Lord Stark,” the ironborn said mockingly.

“You’re Balon’s son,” Eddard Stark acknowledged. His voice was crisp and cool. “Maron, is it?”

“Prince Maron,” he corrected the older lord sharply. “You’d do well to learn some respect.”

Eddard’s eyes narrowed. “I have respect for those who are worthy of it. Are you?”

“You tell me,” Maron spat. “We ironborn understand our place in the world better than most. We reave and we claim what we wish through the strength of our might just as the Targaryens did. Tell me, Lord Stark, why did your forefather bow down to the Targaryens’ might and yet you’re unable to accept ours now?”

“Because your might is cruel and weak,” Eddard replied. There was no hatred or malice in his voice. He had a similar tone to how Stannis did whenever he was educating Harry on an important matter. “But I’m not here to justify what my forefathers did. You and your people have slaughtered hundreds of innocents. You’ve raided villages all along the North, and as the Warden of the North, I must protect my subjects.”

“How caring,” Maron replied snidely. “It will be your folly, Lord Stark.”

“And your thirst for violence will be yours,” Eddard replied evenly.

No more words needed to be spoken as both men readied their weapons. Maron had a slight height advantage over Eddard, but he only had a longsword. To compensate for that, he grasped the hilt with both hands, hoping to overpower Eddard with the swings of his blade.

Eddard charged forward before that could happen, thrusting sharply with his sword directly at Maron’s unprotected face. Maron whirled about, cursing as he used the desk to keep some distance from Eddard. He made a wide slice with his blade, trying to knock Eddard’s sword from his hands, but Eddard kept hold of his weapon easily.

There was an awkward moment as each man tried to size the other up. They were both barely within range of each other’s blades across the desk, but they’d be fighting at a disadvantage if they had to shift their stances to lean over it. They danced back and forth, trying to bait the other into committing to going around one specific side of the desk.

In the end, it was Maron and his rage-fuelled yell that struck first. He lunged forward with an overhand chop that Eddard parried as best he could. The sharp sound of steel meeting steel rang out before Maron’s blade clipped Eddard’s left spaulder. The crunch that sounded told Harry that the metal had definitely dented into Eddard’s shoulder, limiting his range of movement.

Sensing that there was an advantage to be gained by this, Maron howled and rushed forward with another powerful swing of his blade.

Eddard leapt backwards, catching himself against the wall. Maron swung again, and Eddard threw himself aside. Maron’s blade crashed against the stone wall, sending down a flurry of stone chips onto the floor. It took him a moment to unwedge his sword from the gap between the bricks that he’d gotten it caught in, and by that time, Eddard was back on his feet.

“Stand and die, coward!” Maron shouted as he pressed Eddard again.

Sparks flew as their blades collided in a cross, but this time it was Eddard with the advantage. With the dagger in his off hand, he lunged forward and managed a cut straight across Maron’s face.

Maron screamed in pain and shoved Eddard away, breaking off their contact for a moment. He clutched his face, wiping away the blood that was there.

“You’ll pay for that!” Maron declared, panting heavily.

It was as though Eddard had unlocked a demon within Maron from that first blow. Maron grew wild and reckless with his swings, but his overwhelming might made Eddard wary of trying to get into a close engagement with the man. Eddard ended up stowing his dagger at his hip and holding onto the hilt of his longsword with both hands to prevent himself from being overwhelmed completely.

Harry had seen enough fights in the training yard to know that Eddard was in trouble. The man must have already been fighting for quite some time, and it was clear that he was beginning to tire against his opponent. He wasn’t a bad fighter by any means, but he was struggling against Maron’s strength.

Harry knew that he had to do something.

Call it foolish or idiotic, but Harry’s desire to save others had never led him astray before. He pushed open the cabinet door silently when Maron’s back was to him, and he climbed out with his dagger in hand.

Eddard’s eyes widened slightly when he spotted Harry, but he must have realised that Harry’s focus was entirely on Maron. Eddard drove forward with a powerful swing, forcing Maron to parry it, and that was when Harry struck.

Seeing the gap between the plates of metal near his waist, Harry stabbed his dagger into Maron’s side.

The man screamed and turned his head just enough to lose sight of Eddard’s deadly-fast swipe. Maron’s neck was split open as Eddard’s blade sliced cleanly through it, sending out a hot spray of blood that painted the walls and floor of the solar. Maron dropped his blade and clutched his neck, trying to stop the bleeding, but it was already too late. The light faded from his eyes a moment later, leaving Harry and Eddard alone.

Eddard remained wary, eyeing Harry curiously. Harry could understand that. He was, after all, clearly not a part of the attacking army.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Eddard told Harry seriously. “But it’s too late now. You’ll go back and hide in there if you know what’s good for you.”

“No, I won’t,” Harry said clearly, much to the surprise of the older man. “My name is Harry Baratheon. I’m Lord Stannis’ son, and I need an escort back to my father.”