m_findlow

Title: Sailing toward vengeance
Fandom: Game of Thrones
Author: m_findlow
Rating: M. Spoilers for Seasons 1-7.
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 56 - High seas at fandomweekly
Summary: Yara thirsts for revenge but they'll first need help to achieve it.

Yara breathed the salt air deep into her lungs. Nothing could make her feel more alive than the rocking of the sea beneath her boots and the taste of salt on her tongue. Whatever their plight, for now they were free, and so long as that remained the case, they had options.

She spotted her brother hunched over the bow railing. He made for a miserable sight, thin and worn. He was barely a man at all now, she remembered, but even less so as they were cut adrift from their ancestral home.

She came up beside him and leant her elbows on the damp wood, watching the bow cut through the choppy water. 'Don't sulk, Theon. An Iron Islander does not sulk. He takes what he wants, pays the iron price for it or dies trying.'

'Euron took everything from us.'

Yara scowled out across the water, feeling a yearning for the drab grey stones of Pyke that they'd been forced to leave behind as they fled. There was no protocol for a newly crowned king to slay his challengers at a Kingsmoot - nor did she recall any king ever having done so - but Euron was no ordinary king. He was a madman, and would sooner see his own flesh and blood dead than live to threaten his reign.

Yara gritted her teeth in resolve. 'He did,' she agreed. 'But only because we let him. Father was weak. He should have sent for you to return home the moment you came of age, taught you how to be man and had his children raised to rule in his stead. Instead he tarried, abandoned his last living son to those he should have been reaving from. He made you what you are.' A eunuch without a spine, she didn't add. Would that she could have made a eunuch of the man who had done such things to her little brother. By rights she'd heard he got more than he deserved but it didn't do anything to quell her own desire to have been the one to do it.

'We still have our ships,' she said. 'And those Iron Islanders who are loyal and true.' They'd have followed her to the very bottom of the ocean. They had followed her all the way up river and across dry land to Deepwood Motte to avenge the wickedness thrust upon her brother, to free him and take him back home, despite her father's protest. They were her men, whether she was king, queen or otherwise. Loyal Greyjoy men.

'I don't want to spend the rest of our lives running from port to port,' Theon moaned. 'I don't want to be a reaver.'

Yara sympathised. Theon had grown up far from home, used to the feel of a horse between his thighs - or a woman - instead of the feel of the ocean waves beneath his feet. He had no taste for reaving and raping, taking what they wanted by force, as was the way of their people in the glory days of yore. Those mainlanders had ruined him, dressed him in their finery and made him soft. They couldn't afford to be soft now.

'Have you been listening to anything I've told you these past few days? I have no intention of trawling up and down the Narrow Sea all our lives, waiting for Euron to come with his fleet and pick us off. We sail for Meereen to make ourselves an alliance.'

She could see the doubt still in Theon's eyes, as grey as the water pressing against their hull. Essos was a strange land with even stranger customs, but not nearly so strange as it was now with a queen ruling over the lands that had been lorded over by the rich and powerful for hundreds of years. If she could topple the might of the Masters with only her dragons and a handful of men, what would she be like now with an army of Unsullied behind her. She would crush the disparate armies of Westeros and what would be left of its crumbling kingdoms would be gifted to those who had supported her.

Theon looked away from her, almost ashamed. 'I don't want to fight someone else's war. I'm done with fighting.'

'We have to if we want to take back what's ours.'

'How?'

Yara turned her brother to face her so that he could see she meant business. 'We're going to give that dragon queen what she wants, and then she's going to give us what we want - to fuck our dear uncle Euron up the arse with an iron pike. We'll take back the Iron Islands and prove to our people that the only true Greyjoys are us. The Drowned God erred once but he will not err again. He has given us both rebirth. What is dead may never die. Remember it.' She gripped him hard by the shoulders, squeezing them almost painfully. 'Remember it, Theon.' She shook him hard. 'Say it!'

'I remember.'

'What do you remember?'

'What is dead may never die.'

She relaxed her grip on him. 'Good.' She leaned over the bow, watching as the dolphins played in its wake. A good sign. Vassals of the Drowned God come to watch over them and escort them to the battle ahead. 'See there, Theon,' she said, pointing at the grey beasts who leapt through the churned water. 'Proof that our course is true.' If dragons could once again be reborn into this world to strike out the corrupt, then so too might the great kraken that adorned their sigil. It would tear apart Euron's fleet timber by timber, squeeze the entrails from his crew, and then Euron would be hers to do with as she wanted. Perhaps she'd repay him in kind by removing his own manhood. He wouldn't have need of it with what she had planned for him. What was dead could never die, but Yara would make him wish for death.