Chapter 26 23

The Martell collection was missing one piece: Prince Oberyn, the Red Viper. He was the one I actually wanted to meet, but he was off wandering somewhere with no word of when he might return. Prince Oberyn Martell, younger brother of Doran and Elia, was by all accounts a formidable fighter, a sharp mind, and a rutting animal. His bastard daughters lived and were being raised here in Sunspear. Obara Sand, fourteen. Nymeria Sand, eleven. Tyene Sand, eight. Sarella Sand, five. I crossed paths with them often enough, but we had little to say to each other at first. I found them ordinary girls, one among millions, and they found me a puffed-up lordling's son. Then the war with Arianne began, and her cousins fought on her side with considerable effect. Magic and knowledge are all well and good, but one cannot be everywhere at once, and that was precisely what the "Sand Snakes" exploited.

The nickname came about in a rather amusing way. One day they rigged a trap above my bed and I, regrettably, walked straight into it. I was lying there resting when a truly impressive quantity of sand came crashing down on me. It was no secret that I despised sand. I was furious, and in the middle of my very loud and very colorful cursing I heard the delighted laughter of four girls: Obara, Nymeria, Tyene, and Arianne. I started shouting at them and was met with collective hissing and more laughter. Half the castle must have heard me bellow "Sand Snakes." There was considerably more profanity involved, but the name stuck almost immediately.

I spent nearly ten days preparing my revenge, drawing on everything I knew and using my magic to its full extent. Everyone in the castle knew it was coming; nobody had any idea what form it would take. Prince Doran summoned me beforehand and asked me to abandon the foolishness. I agreed. He then demanded an oath. I said nothing. He let me go with a heavy sigh. In the days that followed, the number of people keeping an eye on Arianne "coincidentally" doubled.

Surprise is victory. I had no intention of moving against Arianne. Not then, at any rate, perhaps later. Attacking the enemy's leader is the surest path to winning, but doing it then would only expose me, and I had never once been caught in the act. I intended to keep it that way. So my targets were Obara, Nymeria, and Tyene.

It began with comparatively harmless traps. Someone walked around wearing an unexpected new coat of color. Someone spent quality time on the chamber pot. A sudden onset of itching made the rounds, among other things. The Sand Snakes had an exhausting day, and the girls dropped off to sleep very quickly, after which certain special incense ensured their slumber was exceptionally deep. They breathed it in through the night, enough that a dragon could not have roused them, with a little help from magic besides. The rest was simply a matter of craft. I moved them to the training yard and buried them in sand. I am not cruel, so I left their heads above the surface and even rigged a canopy over them. Well, I am perhaps a little cruel, because I woke them with cold water. The screaming carried through the entire castle. The guards snapped awake and ran toward the sound, and were considerably startled to find three heads protruding from the sand of the training yard. The girls were dug out promptly and came after me burning with righteous fury.

Obara challenged me to a fight, certain she could beat me and humiliate me. It did not go that way. She was the one beaten and humiliated. Nymeria tried to shame me into apologizing, wielding every argument available to her, ranging from my sex to my illustrious ancestors. Tyene attempted to poison me a couple of times, then stopped rather quickly. She clearly did not enjoy being poisoned by her own concoctions. I was genuinely startled that an eight-year-old girl was brewing poisons and using them on a person. The first few times I suspected the older ones.

After several entertaining days they gave up, apparently willing to wait until I lowered my guard. But the girls have no gift for patience, and they resumed their efforts after I made the joke about "Sand Snakes." Everyone appreciated that one, even Prince Doran cracked a smile. The Sand Snakes, red-faced with humiliation, promised me every torment imaginable with their eyes. More entertaining days followed, but it all came to an end when the peace with Arianne was signed. The Sand Snakes kept trying, naturally, but without Arianne's support they were losing every round and eventually came to the table themselves. Now we cause trouble together.

That is how, in the space of half a year, I acquired four companions with whom to stir things up around the castle.

...

In my previous life I was the greatest swordsman of my age. Nothing could stop me on the battlefield. Orcs, trolls, the great serpents of the north, all of them fell to my hand. Now I am twelve years old and capable of losing a sparring match against two common guardsmen. It wounds my pride. I could blame it on age, but that is a child's excuse.

Still, I ran into a particular problem: in a one-on-one bout I could defeat almost any guardsman in the Martell household. The few who got the better of me did so through sheer strength and endurance. And so I had reached the point where I needed a genuinely skilled sparring partner, and that was in short supply here. No slight against the men themselves, they were far stronger and more accomplished than the guards of most other houses, but they were not at my level. At some point it had become more useful to drill on my own, building reflexes through repetition, than to keep taking on opponents in practice bouts.

The brutal heat meant I went to bed early, slept four or five hours, and rose before dawn. So each morning I went to the training yard before breakfast. Adapting and reshaping my fighting style to fit my current body had been going smoothly enough. My memories of how I fought as King from Numenor were hazy, but I knew well how the Witch-king of Angmar had moved. And there lay the problem. The Nazgul are wraiths, stronger and faster and more dexterous than men, untouched by fatigue. I am a man, and I cannot fight as one. I had to rebuild a wraith's style of combat into something a human body could sustain.

My adaptation and reflex-building moved considerably faster because of magic. Magic is a remarkably versatile thing, useful in almost any situation, but what I had access to amounted to parlor tricks and trifles. Yet even the most trivial thing can accomplish a great deal if its effect is stretched across time. To engrave a reflex for a given movement into muscle memory normally takes around ten thousand repetitions. For a gifted practitioner, five or six thousand. For me, under magic, three. What I do is simple: I saturate my body with the faintest trace of magic, and it improves in every respect. Through this constant, modest influence, the body's potential ceiling grows, it becomes stronger, faster, more enduring. But magic is not a cure for everything, and to raise that possible ceiling I still had to work at the limits of my strength. The harder you push now, the greater the reward later.

There was also the standard method of direct bodily enhancement through magic, but it came with a catch. To double your strength costs two arbitrary units of magic. To triple it costs four. Four times costs eight. At some point the cost of the enhancement does more harm than the enhancement is worth. And again everything came back to the physical condition of the body. A trained man benefits far more from the same enhancement than a soft, untrained one.

So for a solid hour now the poor training dummy had been enduring my assault. I would have gone on drilling, but then a voice reached me from the side:

"My lord, have you defeated Ser Dummy, or is this particular foe simply beyond you?" There was considerable irony in the voice, but the verbal sparring with the Sand Snakes had given me a decent enough shield against that sort of thing.

"Indeed, the wretch will not fall no matter what I do. Perhaps you could demonstrate your own skill. I hear you are quite the expert in that regard, Ser..." I left it open deliberately, angling for his name while I looked him over. He reminded me of someone.

"Regrettably, I am no match for so celebrated a warrior," he sighed with great poetic feeling.