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.”

So the voyagers had parted ways as they left the islands. Lady Meredith turned back east for home, whilst Alys Westhill and her Sun Chaser pressed on westward, chasing the sun. Eustace Hightower’s voyage home would prove to be nigh as perilous as his voyage out had been. There were more storms to be weathered, though none as terrible as the one that had claimed his brother’s ship. The prevailing winds were against them, forcing them to tack and tack again. They had taken three of the great grey lizards on board, and one bit his steersman, whose leg turned green and had to be removed. A few days later, they encountered a pod of leviathans. One of them, a huge white bull larger than a ship, had slammed into Lady Meredith of a purpose, and cracked her hull. Afterward Ser Eustace had changed course, making for the Summer Islands, which he figured to be their nearest landfall. They were farther south than he had realized, however, and ended up missing the islands entirely and fetching up instead upon the coast of Sothoryos.

   “We were there for a full year,” he told his grandsire, “trying to make Lady Meredith seaworthy again, for the damage was greater than we’d thought. There were fortunes to be had there as well, though, and we were not blind to that. Emeralds, gold, spices, aye, all that and more. Strange creatures…monkeys that walk like men, men that howl like monkeys, wyverns, basilisks, a hundred different sorts of snakes. Deadly, all of them. Some of my men just vanished of a night. The ones who didn’t began to die. One was bitten by a fly, a little prick upon his neck, nothing to fear. Three days later his skin was sloughing off, and he was bleeding from his ears and cock and arse. Drinking salt water will make a man mad, every sailor knows that, but the freshwater is no safer in that place. There are worms in it, almost too small to see, if you swallowed them they laid their eggs inside you. And the fevers…hardly a day went by when half my men were fit to work. We all would have perished, I think, but some Summer Islanders passing by came on us. They know that hell better than they let on, I think. With their help, I was able to get Lady Meredith to Tall Trees Town, and from there to home.”

There ended his tale, and his great adventure.

As for Lady Alys Westhill, born Elissa of House Farman, where her adventure ended we cannot say. The Sun Chaser vanished into the west, still searching for the lands beyond the Sunset Sea, and was never seen again.

Except…

Many years later, Corlys Velaryon, the boy born on Driftmark in 53 AC, would take his ship the Sea Snake on nine great voyages, sailing farther than any man of Westeros had ever sailed before. On the first of those voyages, he sailed beyond the Jade Gates, to Yi Ti and the isle of Leng, and returned with such a wealth of spice and silk and jade that House Velaryon became, for a time, the wealthiest house in all the Seven Kingdoms. On his second voyage, Ser Corlys sailed even farther east, and became the first Westerosi ever to reach Asshai-by-the-Shadow, the bleak black city of the shadowbinders at the edge of the world. There he lost his love and half his crew, if the tales be true…and there as well, in Asshai’s harbor, he glimpsed an old and much weathered ship that he would swear forevermore could only have been Sun Chaser.

   In 59 AC, however, Corlys Velaryon was a boy of six, dreaming of the sea, so we must leave him and turn back once again to the end of autumn in that fateful year, when the skies darkened, the winds rose, and winter came again to Westeros.

The winter of 59–60 AC was an exceptionally cruel one, all those who survived it agreed. The North was hit first and hardest, as crops died in the field, streams froze, and bitter winds came howling over the Wall. Though Lord Alaric Stark had commanded that half of every harvest be preserved and put aside against the coming winter, not all his bannermen had obeyed. As their larders and granaries emptied, famine spread across the land, and old men bade farewell to their children and went out into the snow to die so their kin might live. Harvests failed in the riverlands, the westerlands, and the Vale as well, and even down into the Reach. Those who had food began to hoard, and all across the Seven Kingdoms the price of bread began to rise. The price of meat rose even faster, and in the towns and cities, fruits and vegetables all but disappeared.