As her crew began to disembark, throngs of merchants, porters, whores, seamen, and thieves gaped in shock. Nine of every ten men coming ashore were black or brown. Ripples of excitement ran up and down the docks. Had the Lady Meredith indeed crossed the Sunset Sea? Were the peoples of the fabled lands of the far west all dark-skinned as Summer Islanders?

Only when Ser Eustace Hightower himself emerged did the whispers die. Lord Donnel’s grandson was gaunt and sun-burned, with lines on his face that had not been there when he sailed. A handful of Oldtown men were with him, all that remained of his original crew. One of his grandsire’s customs officers met him on the dock and a quick exchange ensued. The Lady Meredith’s crew did not simply look like Summer Islanders; they were Summer Islanders, hired on in Sothoryos (“at ruinous wages,” Ser Eustace complained) to replace the men he’d lost. He would require porters, the captain said. His holds were bulging with rich cargo…but not from lands beyond the Sunset Sea. “That was a dream,” he said.

Soon enough Lord Donnel’s knights turned up, with orders to escort him to the Hightower. There, in his grandsire’s high hall with a cup of wine in hand, Ser Eustace Hightower told his tale. Lord Donnel’s scribes scribbled as he spoke, and within days the story had spread all over Westeros, by messenger, bard, and raven.

The voyage had begun as well as he could have hoped, Ser Eustace said. Once beyond the Arbor, Lady Westhill had steered her Sun Chaser south by southwest, seeking warmer waters and fair winds, and the Lady Meredith and Autumn Moon had followed. The big Braavosi ship was very fast when the wind was in her sails, and the Hightowers had difficulties keeping pace. “The Seven were smiling on us, at the start. We had the sun by day and the moon by night, and as sweet a wind as man or maid could hope for. We were not entirely alone. We glimpsed fisherfolk from time to time, and once a great dark ship that could only have been a whaler out of Ib. And fish, so many fish…some dolphins swam beside us, as if they had never seen a ship before. We all thought that we were blessed.”

Twelve days of smooth sailing out of Westeros, the Sun Chaser and her two companions were as far south as the Summer Islands, according to their best calculations, and farther west than any ship had sailed before…or any ship that had returned to tell of it, at least. On the Lady Meredith and Autumn Moon, casks of Arbor gold were breached to toast the accomplishment; on Sun Chaser, the sailors drank a spiced honey wine from Lannisport. And if any man of them was disquieted that they had not seen a bird for the past four days, he held his tongue.

The gods hate man’s arrogance, the septons teach us, and The Seven-Pointed Star says that pride goes before a fall. It may well be that Alys Westhill and the Hightowers celebrated too loudly and too early, there in the ocean deeps, for soon after that the grand voyage began to go badly wrong. “We lost the wind first,” Ser Eustace told his grandfather’s court. “For almost a fortnight there was not so much as a breeze, and the ships moved only so far as we could tow them. It was discovered that a dozen casks of meat on Autumn Moon were crawling with maggots. A small enough thing by itself, but an ill omen. The wind finally returned one day near sunset, when the sky turned red as blood, but the look of it set men to muttering. I told them it boded well for us, but I lied. Before morning the stars were gone and the wind began to howl, and then the ocean rose.”

That was the first storm, Ser Eustace said. Another followed two days later, and then a third, each worse than the one before. “The waves rose higher than our masts, and there was thunder all around, and lightning such as I had never seen before, great cracking bolts that burned the eyes. One struck the Autumn Moon and split her mast from the crow’s nest down to the deck. In the midst of all that madness, one of my hands screamed that he had seen arms rising from the water, the last thing any captain needs to hear. We had lost all sight of Sun Chaser by then, all that remained was my lady and the Moon. The sea was washing over our decks with every rise and fall, and men were being swept over the side, clinging uselessly to lines. I saw the Autumn Moon founder with my own eyes. One moment she was there, broken and burning, but there. Then a wave rose up and swallowed her and I blinked and she was gone, quick as that. That was all it was, a wave, a monster of a wave, but all my men were screaming ‘Kraken, kraken!’ and not a word I said would ever disabuse them.

“I will never know how we survived that night, but we did. The next morning the sea was calm again, the sun was shining, and the water was so blue and innocent a man might never know that under it my brother floated, dead with all his men. Lady Meredith was in sad shape, sails torn, masts splintered, nine men amongst the missing. We said prayers for the lost and set about making what repairs we could…and that afternoon, our crow’s eye saw sails in the distance. It was Sun Chaser, come back to find us.”

Lady Westhill had done more than simply survive the storm. She had found land. The winds and raging seas that had separated her Sun Chaser from the Hightowers had driven her westward, and when the dawn broke, her man in the crow’s nest had espied birds circling a hazy mountain peak on the horizon. Lady Alys made toward it and came upon three small islands. “A mountain attended by two hills,” as she put it. The Lady Meredith was in no fit shape to sail, but with the help of a tow from three boats off the Sun Chaser she was able to make the safety of the islands.

The two battered ships sheltered off the islands for more than a fortnight, making repairs and replenishing their stores. Lady Alys was triumphant; here was land farther to the west than any land had ever been known to be, islands that existed on no known chart. Since there were three of them, she named them Aegon, Rhaenys, and Visenya. The islands were uninhabited, but springs and streams were plentiful, so the voyagers were able to fill their casks with all the fresh water they required. There were wild pigs as well, and huge, sluggish grey lizards as big as deer, and trees heavy with nuts and fruit.

After sampling some of those, Eustace Hightower declared that they had no need to go any farther. “This is discovery enough,” he said. “We have spices here I have never tasted, and these pink fruits…we have our fortunes here, in our hands.”

Alys Westhill was incredulous. Three small islands, even the largest of them a third the size of Dragonstone, that was nothing. The true wonders lay farther west. There might be another Essos just beyond the horizon.

“Or there might be another thousand leagues of empty ocean,” Ser Eustace replied. And though Lady Alys cajoled and pleaded and wove webs of words in the air, she could not move him. “Even had I wished to, my crew would not allow it,” he told Lord Donnel in the Hightower. “To a man, they were convinced they had seen a giant kraken pull Autumn Moon beneath the sea. Had I given the command to sail on, they would have fed me to the waves and found another captain.”