The next day when the sun rose, Blackbean woke Ser Gedmund to inform him that the Lord of the Tides was gone. The entire Velaryon fleet had slipped off during the night. Gedmund Great-Axe snorted. “Run back to Driftmark, I’d venture,” he said. Ned Bean agreed, calling Lord Alyn “a scared boy.”

   They could not have been more wrong. Lord Alyn had taken his ships south, not north. Three days later, whilst Gedmund Great-Axe and his royal fleet still lingered off the coast of Tarth waiting on a raven, battle was joined amongst the rocks, sea stacks, and tangled waterways of the Stepstones. The attack caught the Braavosi unawares, with their grand admiral and twoscore of his captains feasting on Bloodstone with Racallio Ryndoon and the envoys from Tyrosh. Half of the Braavosi ships were taken, burned, or sunk whilst still at anchor or tied to a dock, others as they raised sail and tried to get under way.

The fight was not entirely bloodless. The Grand Defiance, a towering Braavosi dromond of four hundred oars, fought her way past half a dozen smaller Velaryon warships to gain the open sea, only to find Lord Alyn himself bearing down on her. Too late, the Braavosi tried to turn to face her attacker, but the huge dromond was ponderous in the water and slow to answer, and Queen Rhaenys struck her broadside with every oar churning water.

   The Queen’s prow smashed into the side of the great Braavosi ship “like a great oaken fist,” one observer wrote later, splintering her oars, crashing through her planks and hull, toppling her masts, cutting the massive dromond almost in two. When Lord Alyn shouted to his rowers to back them off, the sea rushed into the gaping wound the Queen had made, and the Grand Defiance went down in mere moments, “and with it, the Sealord’s swollen pride.”

Alyn Velaryon’s victory was complete. He lost three ships in the Stepstones (one, sadly, was the True Heart, captained by his cousin Daeron, who perished when she sank), whilst sinking more than thirty and capturing six galleys, eleven cogs, eighty-nine hostages, vast amounts of food, drink, arms, and coin, and an elephant meant for the Sealord’s menagerie. All this the Lord of the Tides brought back to Westeros, along with the name that he would carry for the rest of his long life: Oakenfist. When Lord Alyn sailed Queen Rhaenys up the Blackwater Rush and rode in through the River Gate on the back of the Sealord’s elephant, tens of thousands lined the city streets shouting his name and clamoring for a glimpse of their new hero. At the gates of the Red Keep, King Aegon III himself appeared to welcome him.

Once within the walls, however, it was a different story. By the time Alyn Oakenfist reached the throne room, the young king had somehow vanished. Instead Lord Unwin Peake scowled down at him from atop the Iron Throne, and said, “You fool, you thrice-damned fool. If I dared, I would have your bloody head off.”

The Hand had good cause to be so wroth. However loudly the mob might cheer for Oakenfist, their bold young hero’s rash attack had left the realm in an untenable position. Lord Velaryon might have captured a score of Braavosi ships and an elephant, but he had not taken Bloodstone, nor any of the other Stepstones; the knights and men-at-arms such a conquest would have required had been aboard the larger ships of the royal fleet that he abandoned off the shores of Tarth. The destruction of Racallio Ryndoon’s pirate kingdom had been Lord Peake’s objective; instead, Racallio appeared to have emerged stronger than ever. The last thing the Hand desired was war with Braavos, richest and most powerful of the Nine Free Cities. “Yet that is what you have given us, my lord,” Peake thundered. “You have given us a war.”

   “And an elephant,” Lord Alyn answered insolently. “Pray, do not forget the elephant, my lord.”

The remark drew nervous titters even from Lord Peake’s own handpicked men, Mushroom tells us, but the Hand was not amused. “He was not a man who liked to laugh himself,” the dwarf says, “and he liked being laughed at even less.”

Though other men might fear to provoke Lord Unwin’s enmity, Alyn Oakenfist was secure in his own strength. Though barely a man grown, and bastard born as well, he was wed to the king’s half-sister, had all the power and wealth of House Velaryon at his command, and had just become the darling of the smallfolk. Lord Regent or no, Unwin Peake was not so mad as to imagine he could safely harm the hero of the Stepstones.

“All young men suspect they are immortal,” Grand Maester Munkun writes in the True Telling, “and whenever a young warrior tastes the heady wine of victory, suspicion becomes certainty. Yet the confidence of youth counts for little against the cunning of age. Lord Alyn might smile at the Hand’s rebukes, but he would soon be given good reason to dread the Hand’s rewards.”

Munkun knew whereof he wrote. Seven days after the triumphant return of Lord Alyn to King’s Landing, he was honored in a lavish ceremony in the Red Keep, with King Aegon III seated on the Iron Throne and the court and half the city looking on. Ser Marston Waters, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, dubbed him a knight. Unwin Peake, Lord Regent and Hand of the King, draped an admiral’s golden chain about his neck and presented him with a silver replica of the Queen Rhaenys as a token of his victory. The king himself inquired if his lordship would consent to serve upon his small council, as master of ships. Lord Alyn humbly agreed.

“Then the Hand’s fingers closed about his throat,” says Mushroom. “The voice was Aegon’s, the words Unwin’s.” His leal subjects in the west had long been troubled by reavers from the Iron Islands, the young king declared, and who better to bring peace to the Sunset Sea than his new admiral? And Alyn Oakenfist, that proud and headstrong youth, found he had no choice but to agree to sail his fleets around the southern end of Westeros to win back Fair Isle and end the menace of Lord Dalton Greyjoy and his ironmen.

   The trap was neatly set. The voyage was perilous, and like to take a heavy toll of the Velaryon fleets. The Stepstones teemed with enemies, who would not be taken unawares a second time. Past them lay the barren coasts of Dorne, where Lord Alyn was not like to find safe harbor. And should he gain the Sunset Sea, he would find the Red Kraken waiting with his longships. If the ironmen prevailed, the power of House Velaryon would be broken for good and all, and Lord Peake need never again suffer the insolence of the boy called Oakenfist. If Lord Alyn triumphed, Fair Isle would be restored to its true lords, the westerlands would be freed from further outrage, and the lords of the Seven Kingdoms would learn the price of defying King Aegon III and his new Hand.

The Lord of the Tides made a gift of his elephant to King Aegon III as he took his leave of King’s Landing. Returning to Hull to gather his fleet and take on provisions for the long journey, he said his farewells to his wife, the Lady Baela, who sent him on his way with a kiss, and the news that she was with child. “Name him Corlys, after my grandsire,” Lord Alyn told her. “One day he may sit the Iron Throne.” Baela laughed at that. “I will name her Laena, after my mother. One day she may ride a dragon.”

Lord Corlys Velaryon had made nine famous voyages on his Sea Snake, it will be recalled. Lord Alyn Oakenfist would make six, upon six different ships. “My ladies,” he would call them. On his voyage round Dorne to Lannisport, he sailed a Braavosi war galley of two hundred oars, captured in the Stepstones and renamed the Lady Baela after his young wife.