The Stepstones

The broken chain of islands between Dorne and the Disputed Lands — the drowned remnant, maesters say, of the land bridge the First Men crossed. Every age gives them a new crop of pirate kings, and every age some prince has to burn them out.

The fuller tale

The Stepstones are the wreckage of a bridge between continents. The maesters teach that a land span — the Arm of Dorne — once joined Westeros to Essos, and that the First Men walked it into their new world before it was shattered; the singers say the children of the forest broke it with the hammer of the waters to stop them. What remains is a strewn chain of rocky islands between Dorne and the Disputed Lands, commanding the sea lanes of the narrow sea — which is to say, commanding tolls, which is to say, pirates. Every generation grows its own crop of island kings, and every generation some power has to burn them out; the islands have been claimed by half the Free Cities and held by none of them for long.

History keeps returning to the chain. Here Daemon Targaryen and the Sea Snake fought their grinding private war against the Triarchy in the dragon-kings’ golden age, and here, a generation before the tale, the Band of Nine crowned the last Blackfyre pretender — the War of the Ninepenny Kings, where young Barristan Selmy killed Maelys the Monstrous and closed a rebellion’s bloodline. In the story’s own day the Stepstones belong to the trade’s quieter professionals: smugglers like Davos Seaworth learned their channels by moonlight, and the Lysene pirate prince Salladhor Saan runs them as a family business. Wherever the map pinches, the same trades flourish; the Stepstones are the pinch given a name.

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.