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He had been the King's Hand since long before either of them had held the title. He had worn the office about his neck as sure as if it had been the finely worked gold chain of King's Landing itself, each outstretched palm locked fingers-clasped about the wrist that came after it. But the symbol of a man's devotion to Stannis Baratheon was no more crafted in gold than Stannis was toasted with wine. With cold water and a leather pouch, Davos Seaworth was the king's man, and had been ever. He had been the King's Hand sixteen years hence, from the day his hand had been Stannis's to shorten. From the day Davos had given it to him.
It was misleading to call his pouch of fingerbones a reminder of his lord's justice; in so many years, he had never forgotten that day. It was only that 'keepsake' was a queer word for it, a foolish sentiment for a maimed smuggler from Flea Bottom. He still remembered.
Davos was in his twenty-sixth year during the siege of Storm's End. His Marya was fresh and energetic and soft to the touch, and while his black sail flew to and from places she could not keep track of, gone for weeks at a time, she wrangled their three sons and nurtured the fourth in her womb. Stannis Baratheon marked his nineteenth name day that year, feasted with the roasted haunches of the keep's mangy curs and whatever roots were left to be dug up from the dirt. He was young and solemn and beautifully resolute, thinner than he deserved to be, with hair of an indelible black like ink. Stannis had the height of his family: he was a huge, towering scion of duty and honor, and the gauntness of their starvation rations only added to the effect. If not for Davos who was twenty-six, and Marya who was soft, and Stannis who was resolute, the Siege of Storm's End would have ended differently, and Eddard Stark's woefully late arrival would have meant nothing and less.
There were few enough men capable of holding a keep without provisions for a year, against superior numbers on land and sea. There were even fewer who could do so at the young, untried age that Lord Stannis had been charged with the task. But hold he did, and they had loved him a little better for it then than they might have now -- because they loved Robert, and did not love Aerys, and because they loved the crowned stag, indelible black on a yellow field. If not for Stannis who was resolute, who held the line of his family's castle for an impossible year, there would not have been crows. Maester Cressen had but two left to send, or they would have eaten those as well -- but off they went, winging black through the night. With them went forth the offer: Storm's End starves, and will reward fairly any man who brings food past the Redwyne cordon. A few had dared, and sunk.
Marya had a high, fluttering laugh that Davos missed when he was at sea. She was a good woman, the best of all women who were ever undeserved by a man, and she laughed when Davos took her to his bed. Accordingly, he did this often, and though too many of his days were spent at sea, they had managed the blessing of three hearty sons, and a fourth well along. She could cook like the Mother incarnate, could his Marya, and their boys trailed after her like ducklings. But the life of a smuggler was not suited to a large family, and all of these, his treasured family, were also mouths in need of feeding. If not for Marya, with the warmth of the Mother and the sweet, smiling embrace of the Maiden, Davos would not have needed the money for a wife and four children.
In his own youth, Davos had fashioned himself meant for greatness, forbidden greatness. The sort of greatness a boy from Flea Bottom could aspire to. A boy who had spent the better part of his years on ships, seeing the world and wanting more of it than his father dared. And he had gotten his notoriety after all. From the Citadel to the Free Cities, Davos the Smuggler was known. He was a man of high spirits and kind temper, friend to the Lyseni pirate, Salladhor Saan. He was the best smuggler in the Seven Kingdoms. And had he been twenty-seven when Storm's End sought aid, his fourth child newly born, he might not have risked a swift execution on the promise of an unspecified reward from an unknown storm lord. He might have had a year's more wisdom, and wisdom's caution. Had he been twenty-five, he might have been too young himself, too uncertain to succeed: the Redwyne ships might have caught the long shadow of his little black skiff as it rushed just a bit too fast into the wispy torchlight of Storm's End. If Davos had not been twenty-six, if not for that, he might have been too brash too succeed, or no longer brash enough to make the attempt. He had been the best smuggler in the Seven Kingdoms, and he had known it beyond any doubt. This onion voyage had been a challenge.
Such were the circumstances that first brought Davos kneeling at the feet of a young storm lord with hair as black as a smuggler's sails and lips set in a narrow line.
"Davos," he pronounced. There was a crispness to his voice, a careful way he had of biting down into each syllable to squeeze the juice from it. He was not a man who learned other men's names half-heartedly. Stannis could never have tolerated that sort of ill standard in himself, even then. He probably never had. "I have heard of your name. Take your feet, smuggler -- I mislike a man who will not look me in the eye." Such were his first words: no profusions of thanks, not from Lord Stannis Baratheon.
Even so, the smuggler saw his thanks without him having to speak it. It was there when he stood, visible in his tired blue eyes. The boy was relieved. Davos felt rather proud of himself once more, and smiled. "I've heard of your name as well, my lord."
This did not prompt Stannis to smile in return. He stood there, impassive, the oars of his mouth dipping into a frown instead. "You inconvenience me," he said bluntly. At the time, he had marked this for the indifference of a high-born lord towards a baseborn criminal, but within just hours of knowing each other, Davos had understood otherwise. This was the only way Stannis spoke to anyone he knew, from peasant to king. The smuggler liked this about him, somehow; it made him feel honored, in a way. "I had thought to greet an honest fisherman. I cannot give honors to a man who flouts the laws of the Seven Kingdoms."
Davos looked him in the eye still, because he had been permitted. "I beg your pardon, my lord," he dared, twenty-six and brash, "but that inability was not voiced in your letter." This was a bit of a gamble, since Davos had not been privileged enough to see the message for himself, and could not have read the words even if he had -- but he reasoned that no starving man would demand that only honest men send their aid.
The boy lord at Storm's End stared at him for several very long seconds. He had a square, regal jaw, the same as his brothers, and currently it ground up against his top teeth, betraying his irritation rather obviously. "No. I did not." Stannis paced away from where he stood, and back again, a habit that would diminish as he got older. "Very well," he resolved. "Your onions and dried fish have saved some many lives. I'll think on this and decide what is fair. It's not as though you can leave immediately in any event."
They'd spent several hours of the next day in each other's company, but by the time Davos struck for home the next night, it was not clear that Lord Stannis had come to any decision about how to reward his placidly lawless savior. Despite the uncertainty, he found that he had liked the boy. Stannis was grave, brooding, and perhaps obsessively just. He was honest to an embarrassing extent, as though he had never learned to wield guile as a weapon, and his eyes gave him away in everything that honesty and silence had spared. It didn't compel Davos to dissemble to him, as it might've: on the contrary, it was intimidating. There was a purity to this strange, scowling boy. He was awkward, and irritable, and good, and innocent. In sixteen years, Davos had never reversed that part of his opinion.
A month passed. At last, regrouped after the Battle of the Trident, Eddard Stark's army marched to Storm's End to break the siege. Just as he had promised, Stannis sent for Davos.
"I imagine you're still smuggling," was his greeting this time. There was more color in his face, and a bit more flesh, from having had a few days' solid meals at last -- but there was no more good humor in that face than there had been.
Davos reasoned he didn't have to be intimidated by this accusation; if Stannis had meant to see him dead for his crimes, he'd have done it on their last meeting. "I've had little enough choice," he returned, mostly unbothered. "Your brother's armies will be at King's Landing soon enough. Aerys may have locked in the city, but I wasn't about to leave my family there. So out they went, just a few days ago when the moon was black again. No worse a crime than your support of your brother's uprising, I should think."
That darkened his face. When at last he answered, Stannis said simply, "It is a crime, as you say. But you are a fool to utter such truths aloud. Few men reward honesty."
"And few lords like a baseborn smuggler to meet their eyes."
Stannis smiled, evidently unaccustomed to the act. "Yes."
"Then I am not such a fool." Ah, how he had liked to speak well of himself in those days.
"Or a lucky fool." Stannis had a fair amount of lordly breeding in him all the same -- the sort that rendered him apparently entitled to intrude upon people of lower breeding without their permission, as he did now. He reached out for a lock of Davos's brown hair, the color of dried mud. Stannis rubbed it between his fingers as though trying to see if this was its true color, or it was masked by dirt. This was its true color. He let go. "You have a common look to you, you know." Davos did know. "You appear of no consequence at all, even judged among other criminals. Yet you are cleverer than you look."
Davos didn't answer, being unsure how.
Stannis waved off his own comment. "Never you mind. Do you not wish to know how I have planned to reward you for your heroics?"
With a dour and septonly lecture, if I were to hazard a guess, Davos thought -- but he found he was unable to make a joke at Stannis Baratheon's expense, and so kept it to himself. "I supposed you would come to it eventually. My lord."
"You have the tact of a fishmonger."
But so did Stannis Baratheon.
"This is my recompense for you, Davos. For your cargo of onions and dried fish, and your black sail and black oars -- and your fool's honesty -- I shall make of you a ser, a knight of mine own company. There is a small castle and grounds at Cape Wrath which I am of a mind to settle upon you -- fine, good lands for your wife and children." This seemed to be very important to him for some reason, as he went on, "Thanks to our rains, we have some of the richest soil in the Seven Kingdoms." Davos was not a farmer, nor very much interested in converting. "For your life as a criminal, which I understand to have encompassed many years' time, you must perforce still be punished. I would have of you the last joints of your four fingers of one hand. It is fair that it should be so." The teenager stared at him, narrow blue eyes pleading. Then he repeated himself, though as to why, Davos could not say: "You know well enough that it is fair."
It was a bit close to a dour and septonly lecture after all. Stannis did not seem to have any other way of talking.
Davos had never been given the favorable option of being maimed before. Being maimed had heretofore always been the unfavorable option, with the other options being 'sail away as fast as you can, Davos' or 'maim the other fellow before he can do the deed.' As yet, Davos was a man unmaimed. He was in no hurry to alter those circumstances.
The smuggler had to wonder what would happen if he refused this lordling's terms. Had Stannis even considered that he might reject them? And if he did, would Stannis take his fingers anyway? It was worth at least considering.
He thought again of Marya and their boys, and their suckling babe to come any day now. The place where they were now was not Flea Bottom, was not inside Mad Aerys's closed gates, but it was not a good place. It was damp, and ill-sheltered, and half of his family would catch cold, like as not. "I'll think on your offer," he said, finally. He stared at his hands. His fingers. Stannis wanted to cut off his fingers, this was mad to even consider. Ah, but then, this was a knighthood.
Stannis clamped his jaw down, hard. He folded his arms over his doublet. "The terms are fair," he said once more, now clearly irritated at Davos's lack of joy. "Gods be good, I did not threaten to geld you."
Davos shuddered.
"I am no knight, my lord," he explained, for his hesitation. "I take no pleasure of swords and horsemanship, and I would not be well met in the king's court, whichever king might hold it. My life is on a ship."
"Let it be on a ship, then. I'll give you a damn ship," he replied impatiently. "We have plenty enough of them."
A ship. A castle. A knighthood.
Still, Davos had never wanted to be a servant; he had never longed to be anyone's sworn man. He had his own little ship, his own jobs and his own course. A smuggler was free, but a knight was a kept creature, and Davos had never wished to be kept. He had never dreamed of it.
Why was it somehow more tempting if Stannis Baratheon should keep him? What about this man made him so difficult to lie to, and all the harder to refuse?
"If you would wield the blade that taps my shoulders, my lord," he said, now forgetting his hands to look Lord Stannis in the eyes, "then I would have you wield the blade that strikes my fingers from my hand as well."
It was Stannis's turn to be taken aback, rendered mute.
"It is fair," Davos pressed.
Stannis looked injured, heartsick. It sat ill on his handsome, highborn features. "It shall be as you say," he gritted out, at long last.
Perhaps Davos had belonged to him even then. But it was sworn, at knee, in a courtyard, and it was sealed, knees quavering, in a kitchen.
The long, Baratheon two-hander that Stannis knighted him with was not what he used to shorten his fingers. "That would be ill done," his lord said as they three stood in the kitchens: Stannis, Davos, and aging Maester Cressen. "I have no wish to mutilate you beyond what is owed, ser. This will be the cleanest way."
Davos, now Ser Davos Seaworth, was no longer concerned with the cleanest way. He had gone slightly out of mind, thinking of nothing else but his impending fate. He said naught.
Maester Cressen spoke instead, with soft, gentled words that made Davos feel restful -- as the milk of the poppy he'd given him was just beginning to do. "Now, feel there, my lord, where the bones have their joint. You must make your cut there, with speed and strength, lest you find yourself in need of a second strike. I pray you do not falter -- "
"Yes, yes, be silent, old man, be done with you! Enough." His deep blue eyes were hard now, with a wildness to them: this was what passed for terror on the face of Stannis Baratheon. "There is no reason I would hesitate. This is just. He knows it to be just -- "
Davos, who could not help himself, laughed. He was overcome with the urge to save this boy from doing something neither of them remotely wished to do, yet here they were, all the same.
"Hold your tongue, ser," Stannis snapped at him. His hand was clenched so hard around the meat cleaver that Davos was surprised he failed to crush the handle.
"My lord," Davos answered him quietly, their faces very close. It was very easy to move back from humor to solemnity. "I have sworn my vows to you." He held his eyes once more, common to noble, brown to blue. "If I am yours, then by your leave."
"It is justice," Stannis went on as though his ability to keep from doing so were broken. "I do not enjoy it. I think I loathe it, but -- " There he struck.
Davos fainted at the first snap of bone. And in the same snap, Davos Seaworth had truly belonged to Stannis Baratheon.
He had asked to keep them after, his fingers. They were safe away in a leather pouch, and that on a thong around his neck, never far. He wore them to Dragonstone, where Stannis bade him offer counsel. Capture Dragonstone in my name, brother, Robert had asked him. Stannis was dutiful and loyal, but he was no navy's admiral -- but neither was Davos. Davos was a smuggler, an upjumped knight with an onion legacy. Still, he offered counsel as best he could, and between them, they managed.
It came a crushing blow to Stannis when Robert settled the rocks of Dragonstone on him, and left Storm's End to their youngest brother, Renly, a lad of perhaps five years. Stannis had grown up in Storm's End, had loved the place -- had starved for it to still stream under the black and gold banners. He took the news with stiff irritation, as he did all news -- but Davos could see how it wounded him.
He had his fingerbones still at the breaking of the Greyjoy Rebellion, when he first began to think of them as lucky. Stannis had left Davos to his own ship that time, but it rankled the Lord of Dragonstone to do so. It rankled Davos too, he discovered: Stannis had more knights and lords bannerman now that he had a proper holdings of his own, and he relied upon more than just the shabby knight he had named, with the fingers he had cut. When the rebellion was put down, Stannis sought him out again -- with much to say for how much the other lords had tried his patience.
"They are not as you or I, Davos," he ground out, teeth worn down. "They are a court of capering fools in a war or out of it, that lot, and I have not the least interest in their merrymaking."
"Surely there can be no harm in it, now the danger is past."
"There is harm in all things, smuggler," Stannis answered, unwavering. The cold, salt air of the north ruffled his hair, indelible black. "Even in the spoils of war. You know that as well as any man." He reached forward to press his fingers to the little pouch of fingerbones, still without permission. Davos nodded. Stannis sounded as irritated as ever. "You know how much love I bear you," he said unexpectedly.
The onion knight felt Stannis Baratheon's warm hand pressed to the side of his neck. He spoke, and the apple of his throat moved under Stannis's thumb. "I would never dishonor it."
The young storm lord stared carefully at him. "Nor I," he said sharply. "Nor be party to your dishonor. You have a wife who is true to you -- and it would be sinful between men." He was flushed, angry to have even spoken it -- but Davos did not wonder why he had. It was not in Stannis to dissemble, and never had been. "You and I will not."
They did not; they had not. Sixteen years loyal to Stannis, the lord of Dragonstone had kept to his pledge even when he had lost so much else -- the hair had retreated on his head, the blue in his eyes had dimmed to the banked center of a flame, the last of his sentimentality had sunk low in the coals. Not once had he faltered.
Yet he kept Davos close by him, close even when Maester Cressen fell away, even when the red woman drew him to other sins that made him forget his life at all. And Stannis came to him still, on the night he had plucked him back from the dungeons and named him Lord of the Rainwood, Hand of the King. They walked a while together along the battlements as they had, that first day at Storm's End, while different gods looked down at each of them from the stars. Davos had lost the fingerbones weeks ago. He too had lost much.
"Tell me you are still mine," King Stannis demanded. "Whatever else we have become, tell me that."
He had never belonged to anyone else. He answered thus.